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.
-
The only kind of love that helps anyone grow is unconditional love.
-
Authentic Christianity should lead to maturity, personality, and reality. It should fashion whole men and women living lives of love and communion.
-
The Christian with depth is the person who has failed and who has learned to live with it.
-
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.
-
Our identity rests in God's relentless tenderness for us revealed in Jesus Christ.
-
There is a beautiful transparency to honest disciples who never wear a false face and do not pretend to be anything but who they are.
-
One of my realizations in such an earthy atmosphere was that many of the burning theological issues in the church were neither burning nor theological.
-
Be daring enough to be different, humble enough to make mistakes, wild enough to be burnt in the fire of love, real enough to make others see how phony you are.
-
There is the "you" that people see and then there is the "rest of you". Take some time and craft a picture of the "rest of you." This could be a drawing, in words, even a song. Just remember that the chances are good it will be full of paradox and contradictions.
-
Don't try to understand it. You won't succeed. Don't try to see it. You can't. Try to live it, and you will be living out of the center.
-
If asked whether I am finally letting God love me, just as I am, I would answer, 'No, but I'm trying.
-
Grace is sufficient even though we huff and puff with all our might to try and find something or someone that it cannot cover. Grace is enough...
-
The story goes that a public sinner was excommunicated and forbidden entry to the church. He took his woes to God. 'They won't let me in, Lord, because I am a sinner.' 'What are you complaining about?' said God. 'They won't let Me in either.
-
No man can adequately reach and explain a single word of God with all his words.
-
The trouble with our ideals is that if we live up to all of them, we become impossible to live with.
-
We must go out into a desert of some kind your backyard will do and come into a personal experience of the awesome love of God.
-
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.
-
To be alive is to be broken; to be broken is to stand in need of grace.
-
We are made for Christ, and nothing less will ever satisfy us.