We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can almost be as stupid as a cabbage as long as you doubt.
Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. Grace, you know, does not just have to do with forgiveness of sins alone.
I'm practicing the discipline of not having to have the last word.
Suppose our failures occur, not in spite of what we are doing, but precisely because of it.
A carefully cultivated heart will, assisted by the grace of God, foresee, forestall, or transform most of the painful situations before which others stand like helpless children saying “Why?
What a child does when not told what to do is the final indicator of what and who that child is.
The aim of God in history is the creation of an all-inclusive community of loving persons, with Himself included in that community as its prime sustainer and most glorious inhabitant.
In many cases, our need to wonder about or be told what God wants in a certain situation is nothing short of a clear indication of how little we are engaged in His work.
Few people arise in the morning as hungry for God as they are for cornflakes or toast and eggs.
What is truly profound is thought to be stupid and trivial, or worse, boring, while what is actually stupid and trivial is thought to be profound. That is what it means to fly upside down.
Our failure to hear His voice when we want to is due to the fact that we do not in general want to hear it, that we want it only when we think we need it.
Sometimes we get caught up in trying to glorify God by praising what He can do and we lose sight of the practical point of what He actually does do.
Jesus, Willard says, “does not call us to do what he did, but to be as he was, permeated with love. Then the doing of what he did and said becomes the natural expression of who we are in him.
The idea of having faith in Jesus has come to be totally isolated from being his apprentice and learning how to do what he said.
Actions are not impostions on who we are, but are expressions of who we are. They come out of our heart and the inner realities it supervises and interacts with
We don't believe something by merely saying we believe it, or even when we believe that we believe it. We believe something when we act as if it were true.
The truly powerful ideas are precisely the ones that never have to justify themselves.
The cautious faith that never saws off a limb on which it is sitting, never learns that unattached limbs may find strange unaccountable ways of not falling.
There is no avoiding the fact that we live at the mercy of our ideas This is never more true than with our ideas about God.
Anything done in anger can be done better without it!
The command is "Do no work." Just make space. Attend to what is around you. Learn that you don't have to DO to BE. accept the grace of doing nothing. Stay with it until you stop jerking and squirming.
I think that, when I die, it might be some time until I know it.
An obsession merely with doing all God commands may be the very thing that rules out being the kind of person that he calls us to be.
We were built to count, as water is made to run downhill. We are placed in a specific context to count in ways no one else does. That is our destiny.
Last words of his mother to his father: "Keep eternity before the children.
Our most serious failure today is the inability to provide effective practical guidance as to how to live the life of Jesus. And I believe that is due to this very real loss of biblical realism for our lives
The “interior castle” of the human soul, as Teresa of Avila called it, has many rooms, and they are slowly occupied by God, allowing us time and room to grow.
To manipulate, drive or manage people is not the same thing as to lead them.
May I just give you this word? Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action.
It was an important day in my life when at last I understood that if he needed forty days in the wilderness at one point, I very likely could use three or four.
. The world hardly needs more of these. )
Legalists and theological experts with “lips close to God and hearts far away from him” (Isa. 29:13). The world hardly needs more of these.
The humility that cringes in order that reproof may be escaped or favor obtained is as unchristian as it is profoundly immoral.
We truly live at the mercy of our ideas; this is never more true than with our ideas about God.
Why is it that we look upon our salvation as a moment that began our religious life instead of the daily life we receive from God?
And if you are already flying upside down and don’t know it, your cleverness will do you little good.
Hell is not an 'oops!' or a slip. One does not miss heaven by a hair, but by constant effort to avoid and escape God.
Single-minded and joyous devotion to God and his will, to what God wants for us-and to service to him and to others because of him-is what the will transformed into Christliheness looks like.
The key, then, to loving God is to see Jesus, to hold him before the mind with as much fullness and clarity as possible. It is to adore him.
People who love one another can be silent together.”12
Love is not God, but God is love. It is who he is, his very identity.
Play is the creation of value that is not necessary.
Jesus is the human face on the kingdom of God. He makes it concretely accessible.
Grace is opposed to earning, but not to effort.
Love, as Paul and the New Testament presents it, is not action—not even action with a special intention—but a source of action.
Our destiny is to join a tremendously creative team effort, under unimaginably splendid leadership, on an inconceivably vast plane of activity, with ever more comprehensive cycles of productivity and enjoyment.
Disciples are those who have been so ravished with Christ that others want to be like them.
God’s care for humanity was so great that he sent his unique Son among us, so that those who count on him might not lead a futile and failing existence, but have the undying life of God Himself. JOHN 3:16
Our most serious failure today is the inability to provide effective practical guidance as to how to live the lifwe of Jesus. And I believe that is due to this very real loss of biblical realism for our lives.
Practice routinely purposeful kindnesses and intelligent acts of beauty.
The single most obvious trait of those who profess Christ but do not grow into Christ-likeness is their refusal to take the reasonable and time-tested measures for spiritual growth.
THOSE WHO REALLY do know Christ in the modern world do so by seeking and entering the kingdom of God.
We can become like Christ by doing one thing—by following him in the overall style of life he chose for himself.
