Gabe Davis

Lead pastor @redeemerchrch | Committed to making the kingdom of Jesus visible in the Pacific Northwest | Husband. Dad. Normie.

[Gabe Davis @gabedpnw]

"A man with God is always in the majority" -John Knox

[Gabe Davis @gabedpnw]

😂

[Ryan Denton @TexasPreacher]

Christ did not rise from the dead as a private person, but as the public head of the church; and the head being raised, the rest of the body shall not always lie in the grave. Thomas Watson, Body of Divinity

[Gabe Davis @gabedpnw]

@pastor_whitman When the tempter (Hillsong) would prevail, He will hold you fast.

[Gabe Davis @gabedpnw]

Sometimes I go in disguise.

[Church Curmudgeon @ChrchCurmudgeon]

Oh, look, there’s the pastor in the coffee shop. I’d better go tell him a long, rambling disconnected story.

[Gabe Davis @gabedpnw]

Some people want church to feel like family as long as nobody needs help moving, gets sick, disagrees with them, or asks where they’ve been.

[Gabe Davis @gabedpnw]

Fathers: when you see sinful patterns in your home, let your response include, “Lord, forgive us.” Begin with taking responsibility before you move into fixing, correcting, or lecturing.

[Gabe Davis @gabedpnw]

“For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” (Romans 1:20)

[Laura W. @BumpstockBarbie]

How can you NOT believe in God when octopuses dream and otters have a favorite rock they carry around in a little skin pocket and cows have best friends and bees are out there communicating the coordinates of flowers through dancing and they have regional dialects?

Cats are purring at frequencies associated with bone healing? Forests get absolutely incinerated and respond by growing flowers? Dolphins literally invent names for themselves and yell them across the ocean? Penguins are waddling around Antarctica looking for the perfect rock to give their partner?

CROWS REMEMBER YOUR FACE. THEY TELL OTHER CROWS ABOUT YOU. THEY TELL THEIR CHILDREN ABOUT YOU. YOU CAN HAVE GENERATIONAL BEEF WITH A BIRD. I NEED YOU TO UNDERSTAND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS.

Goats have accents. Rats laugh when you tickle them. Elephants mourn their dead. Whales make songs and then OTHER WHALES LEARN THE SONG and suddenly everybody across the ocean is singing the new song.

Monarch butterflies are born knowing how to fly thousands of miles to a place they have never been.

Sea turtles hatch out of an egg, immediately sprint toward an ocean that they have never seen, disappear into it for like 3 decades and then somehow come back to the same beach they hatched on.

Birds can see colors that we humans can’t see. There are colors out there right now that we don’t even get to know about.

There are sea slugs that eat algae and use the chloroplast/chlorophyll and then are just like…photosynthesizing. And they’re super adorable.

There are mushrooms communicating underground. There are seeds sitting in the dirt for decades like “no actually I will wait. It’s fine.”

Squirrels plant trees because they forget where they put their snacks. Relatable.

A CATERPILLAR GOES INTO A LITTLE BAG THAT IT CREATES ITSELF AND DISSOLVES MOST OF ITS BODY INTO ORGANIC GOO AND REARRANGES ITSELF, GROWS WINGS AND THEN LEAVES. WHY IS THIS NOT MORE BEAUTIFULLY TERRIFYING TO PEOPLE??

And you’re telling me a tiny acorn knows how to become a huge tree? It just has a blueprint inside itself?

Your body started as ONE CELL.

ONE.

And that cell divided itself into a brain that can think about its own existence and eyes that can look at stars and hands that can hold somebody else’s hands and a heart that runs on electricity without you even asking it to?

The iron in our blood was made inside a star??

We are walking around on a wet rock covered in bioluminescent oceans and singing whales and laughing rats and birds holding lifelong grudges and flowers exploding out of fire and somehow we’re supposed to act like this is a normal place to live?

We’re supposed to act like this is all just a random, accidental sequence of events?

[Gabe Davis @gabedpnw]

You say God is sovereign over salvation. Good. Go talk to your neighbor. That doctrine is supposed to give you courage.

[Gabe Davis @gabedpnw]

Excellent

[Michael Foster @thisisfoster]

The Christian parent’s work is to...

- Love and pray
- Teach and model
- Command and correct
- Encourage and bless
- Protect and provide
- Prepare and release

...their children for the glory of God.

The means God has ordained for this work include...

- Parental affection
- The Word
- Prayer
- The sacraments
- The gathered church
- Catechesis and household instruction
- Parental example
- Wise discipline

And parents must entrust their imperfect labor in their children to the gracious God who delights to work from one generation to the next.

[Gabe Davis @gabedpnw]

If comfort is your highest goal, God’s pruning will feel like he's against you. If fruitfulness is your goal, it will feel like he's for you. Same moments, but seen through the lens of what you love/desire most.

[Gabe Davis @gabedpnw]

Behind your conversion may have been a faithful parent, a persistent friend, a sermon, or a season of suffering. All of these are instruments of providence in the hands of a gracious Father.

[Gabe Davis @gabedpnw]

God’s sovereignty should make Christians remarkably difficult to discourage.

[Gabe Davis @gabedpnw]

A doctrine of grace that makes you feel superior to other people is a doctrine you haven’t understood yet.

[Gabe Davis @gabedpnw]

I preferred blue gatorade, but otherwise, 100% accurate.

[Eric Alper 🎧 @ThatEricAlper]

The “urgent care” we had back then

[Gabe Davis @gabedpnw]

@AJKocman Preaching on this exact passage Sunday. Live in shame or rise and build.

[Gabe Davis @gabedpnw]

You weren’t limping toward Jesus when grace found you. You were in a spiritual grave.

The credit for your salvation belongs to Christ and Christ alone.

[Gabe Davis @gabedpnw]

Bring your kids to church. Help them participate. Explain what’s happening.

Some Sundays will feel like you accomplished very little.

Keep going. You’re raising people, and people take a while.

[Martyn Lloyd-Jones Gold @DMLJGOLD]

I say this often, and I am constrained to say it again — I cannot understand the type of Christian who dislikes doctrine.

How do you live? What do you do with your mind? Do you never ask any questions?

—Martyn Lloyd-Jones

[Alex Kocman @AJKocman]

The question muscular Christianity has to answer is not merely what a strong Christian man looks like, but what his strength is for. And the Christian answer is love, rightly ordered.

That means loving God above all, then faithfully loving those whom providence has placed nearest to us: wife, children, church, neighbors, people and place. But the order of loves must not become an excuse for shrinking the scope of Christian duty. The order tells us whom we must love first; it does not tell us whom we are permitted never to love.

You can already see this pattern in Abraham. God calls one particular man, raises up from him a particular household, and from that household forms a particular people in a particular place. Abraham is commanded to order his own house, to teach his children to keep the way of the Lord, and yet from the very beginning the purpose reaches beyond Abraham himself: “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

That matters because biblical particularity is fruitful. It is meant to overflow. God does not obliterate Abraham’s household in order to bless the nations. He establishes it, orders it and uses it. The particular serves the larger purpose.

So there is a form of Christianity we should reject that speaks endlessly about humanity while neglecting the actual human beings at the dinner table. But recovering the goodness of household, place, people and nation does not mean the order of loves terminates there. It does not. Love must be ordered, not truncated.

That is why I find C.T. Studd and the Cambridge Seven such a compelling picture of muscular Christianity. These were not rootless young men with nothing to preserve and nowhere to belong. They were among the most promising men of Victorian Britain: educated, disciplined, athletic, connected and full of worldly prospects. Studd himself was one of the finest cricketers of his generation.

And what did they do with all that strength? They spent it for their King.

In 1885, all seven joined Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission and sailed for China. They learned a difficult language, traveled inland and preached the gospel. Some remained for decades. Studd later served in India and Africa. Their strength did not terminate on itself; it made them more capable of sacrifice.

That, to me, is the kind of muscular Christianity worth recovering. We need strong husbands and fathers, strong churches, strong institutions, strong peoples and nations. We need men who can build, protect, preserve and hand good things down to their children. But if our recovery of Christian manliness is genuinely Christian, it should also sometimes produce men strong enough to leave the familiar and spend themselves among people far from home.

Not every man should go to China. Not every man should become a missionary. But healthy Christian strength ought to produce some men who can.

Strength must always go somewhere. The question is where your loves send it.

We become strong so that we can bear greater burdens of love.

[Michael Foster @thisisfoster]

A Christian home is a home where...

- the children repent to the parents
- the parents repent to the children
- the wife repents to the husband
- the husband repents to the wife

It's not a perfect home.
No such place exists.

It's a home full of repentance, grace, and restoration.