Skye Jethani Quotes

Commodification has led most people to view God as a device to be used rather than an all-powerful Creator to be revered.

The reduction of even sacred things into commodities explains why we exhibit so little reverence for God. In a consumer worldview he has no intrinsic value apart from his usefulness to us.

Modern people may express outrage at the horrors of the African slave trade or the Holocaust, but in truth the commodification of human beings that made those atrocities possible is more prevalent today than ever before.

In a commodity culture we have been conditioned to believe nothing carries intrinsic value. Instead, value is found only in a thing's usefulness to us, and tragically this belief has been applied to people as well.

The abundance of our definitive words about God shows that we don't view him as a great mystery anymore, but as a sterile calculation without ambiguity or obscurity.

We have a certainty about God and his ways that leads us to replace the mystery of faith with manageable spiritual formulas.

Job learned the wisdom of silence before God, but it appears many Christians have abandoned this value in our wordy world.

We've been conditioned to avoid silence at all costs lest we be confronted with our own inner chaos.

Finding true silence requires more than quieting our surroundings. It also means quieting our souls. This is the real dilemma of living in a wordy world.

The spiritual life must find its origin in silence.

Rather than pursuing our calling to present a vision of a world filled with God's power and love, the contemporary church merely presents the world as a two-dimensional facsimile of the consumer culture, albeit with a Jesus fish imprint.

By yielding its imagination to the forms around it, has the church, like ancient Israel, lost the ability to be an alternative people of God?

Have we clothed our faith with the forms of our American culture to the point that our Christianity has morphed into something entirely different - a folk religion altogether consumerist in spirit and content?

Ironically, it is often our zeal to protect our faith that leads to its loss.

If we are to effectively make disciples of Jesus Christ and teach them to obey everything he commanded, we cannot neglect the imagination.