Brennan Manning Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
The fierce words of Jesus addressed to the Pharisees of His day stretch across the bands of time. Today they are directed not only to fallen televangelists but to each of us. We miss Jesus' point entirely when we use His words as weapons against others. They are to be taken personally by each of us. This is the form and shape of Christian Pharisaism in our time. Hypocrisy is not hte prerogative of people in high places. The most impoverished among us is capable of it. Hypocrisy is the natural expression of what is meanest in us all.
-
Our huffing and puffing to impress God, our scrambling for brownie points, our thrashing about trying to fix ourselves while hiding our pettiness and wallowing in guilt are nauseating to God and are a flat denial of the gospel of grace.
-
The gospel declares that no matter how dutiful or prayerful we are, we can't save ourselves. What Jesus did was sufficient.
-
I asked for wonder, and He gave it to me.
-
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.
-
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.
-
When a man or woman is truly honest, it is virtually impossible to insult them personally.
-
Our culture says that ruthless competition is the key to success. Jesus says that ruthless compassion is the purpose of our journey.
-
The only kind of love that helps anyone grow is unconditional love.
-
My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.
-
In my experience, self-hatred is the dominant malaise crippling Christians and stifling their growth in the Holy Spirit.
-
In human beings, love is a quality, a high-prized virtue; in God, love is His identity.
-
Ruthless trust ultimately comes down to this: faith in the person of Jesus and hope in his promise.
-
Our identity rests in God's relentless tenderness for us revealed in Jesus Christ.
-
Trust is our gift back to God, and he finds it so enchanting that Jesus died for love of it.
-
The kingdom is not an exclusive, well-trimmed suburb with snobbish rules about who can live there. No, it is for a larger, homelier, less self-conscious caste of people who understand they are sinners because they have experienced the yaw and pitch of moral struggle.
-
By and large, the gospel of grace is neither proclaimed, understood, nor lived.
-
Childlike surrender and trust, I believe, is the defining spirit of authentic discipleship.
-
The secret of the mystery is: God is always greater. No matter how great we think Him to be, His love is always greater.
-
The Christian with depth is the person who has failed and who has learned to live with it.
-
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.
-
Only reckless confidence in a Source greater than ourselves can empower us to forgive the woulds inflicted by others.