Edward Welch

"One of God's remarkable words to us has been that faith is not a leap into the unknown.  Maybe some people can leap based merely on one person's word, but not anyone with a smidgeon of fear or anxiety.  Faith, instead, is a shift of confidence and trust to One who has always proven faithful."


Edward Welch, Running Scared, p. 306

Edward Welch

...the psalmist says, "If you, O Lord, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand?  But with you there is forgiveness; therefore you are feared" (Ps. 130:3-4).
Do you ever think that your sins are too bad, and that forgiveness for those sins requires you to get your act together first?  If so, you don't fear God.  You are minimizing his forgiveness.  You are acting as though his forgiveness is ordinary, just like that of any person or make-believe god.  If you think like that, you don't believe he is holy.  In contrast, the fear of the Lord leads us to believe that when God makes promises too good to be true, they are indeed true."

Edward Welch, Running Scared, p. 195

Edward Welch

"We can work up the motivation to approach someone in love, but when we are rebuffed we might find that our goal was not so much to love as to find a different strategy to help us be loved.  Persistence in rebalancing* demands the impossible.  It demands the work of the Spirit of love."

*Ed Welch asserts that a person will walk in freedom if they are loving more than they are needing love.  This recalibrating of giving more love than the love that you need is what he is referring to as "rebalancing".

Edward Welch, Running Scared, pg. 186-187

Ed Welch

“The gospel is the story of God covering his naked enemies, bringing them to the wedding feast, and then marrying them rather than crushing them.”

Edward Welch

"The psalmist invite you into perilous situations with them.  They have real questions about whether or not they will be alive tomorrow.  Their situations are probably more extreme than our own, but the psalmists rarely mention the specifics because they don't want the details of their personal stories to bar us from entering in with our own.  Instead, they invite us to participate whenever possible.  They are choirmasters who want us to join them in their chorus to the Lord."