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Experience has taught me that I connect best with others when I connect with the core of myself. When I allow God to liberate me from unhealthy dependence on people, I listen more attentively, love more unselfishly, and am more compassionate and playful. I take myself less seriously, become aware that the breath of the Father is on my face.
Brennan Manning -
What makes a genius? The ability to see. To see what? The butterfly in a caterpillar, the eagle in an egg, the saint in a selfish person, life in death, unity in separation, God in the human and human in God and suffering as the form in which the incomprehensibility of God himself appears.
Brennan Manning
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Justification by grace through faith' is the theologian's learned phrase for what Chesterton once called 'the furious love of G-d.' He is not moody or capricious; He knows no seasons of change. He has a single relentless stance toward us: He loves us. He is the only G-d man has ever heard of who loves sinners. False gods- the gods of human manufacturing- despise sinners, but the Father of (Yeshua) loves all, no matter what they do.
Brennan Manning -
The secret of the mystery is: God is always greater. No matter how great we think Him to be, His love is always greater.
Brennan Manning -
May all your expectations be frustrated, may all your plans be thwarted, may all your desires be withered into nothingness, that you may experience the powerlessness and poverty of a child and sing and dance in the love of God who is the Father, Son and Spirit.
Brennan Manning -
No man can adequately reach and explain a single word of God with all his words.
Brennan Manning -
Trust is our gift back to God, and he finds it so enchanting that Jesus died for love of it.
Brennan Manning -
The conversation of most middle-class Americans, we are told, revolves around consumption: what to buy, what was just bought, where to eat, the price of the neighbor's house, what's on sale this week, our clothes or someone else's, the best car on the market this year, where to spend a vacation. Apparently we can't stop eating, shopping, or consuming. Success is measured not in terms of love, wisdom, and maturity but by the size of one's pile of possessions.
Brennan Manning
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God is a kooky God who can scarcely bear to be without us.
Brennan Manning -
The men and women who are truly filled with light are those who have gazed deeply into the darkness of their own imperfect existence.
Brennan Manning -
By and large, the gospel of grace is neither proclaimed, understood, nor lived.
Brennan Manning -
To affirm a person is to see the good in them that they cannot see in themselves and to repeat it in spite of appearances to the contrary. Please, this is not some Pollyanna optimism that is blind to the reality of evil, but rather like a fine radar system that is tuned in to the true, the good, and the beautiful.
Brennan Manning -
Letting ourselves be loved by God is more important than loving God.
Brennan Manning -
The only kind of love that helps anyone grow is unconditional love.
Brennan Manning
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Stop comparing or boast at your victories. He was referring to enormous vitality and strength of God of Jesus seeking union with us. The living acts of a Christian become somehow the acts of Christ.
Brennan Manning -
Christianity doesn’t deny the reality of suffering and evil… Our hope… is not based on the idea that we are going to be free of pain and suffering. Rather, it is based on the conviction that we will triumph over suffering.
Brennan Manning -
Authentic Christianity should lead to maturity, personality, and reality. It should fashion whole men and women living lives of love and communion.
Brennan Manning -
Choose a single, sacred word or phrase that captures something of the flavor of your intimate relationship with God. A word such as Jesus, Abba, Peace, God or a phrase such as "Abba, I belong to you." . . . Without moving your lips, repeat the sacred word inwardly, slowly, and often.
Brennan Manning -
I you think you've done it, then you're wrong. Because you're not finished until you have achieved everything that you never thought you could.
Brennan Manning -
The trouble with our ideals is that if we live up to all of them, we become impossible to live with.
Brennan Manning
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In essence, there is only one thing God asks of us - that we be men and women of prayer, people for whom God is everything and for whom God is enough. That is the root of peace. We have that peace when the gracious God is all we seek. When we start seeking something besides Him, we lose it.
Brennan Manning -
If asked whether I am finally letting God love me, just as I am, I would answer, 'No, but I'm trying.
Brennan Manning -
We miss Jesus' point entirely when we use His words as weapons against others.
Brennan Manning -
While the impostor draws his identity from past achievements and the adulation of others, the true self claims identity in its belovedness. We encounter God in the ordinariness of life: not in the search for spiritual highs and extraordinary, mystical experiences but in our simple presence in life.
Brennan Manning