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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Backyards
The Christian with depth is the person who has failed and who has learned to live with it.Collection: Christian
I have been seized by the power of a great affection.Collection: Jesus
We even refuse to be our true self with God- and then wonder why we lack intimacy with him.Collection: Self
The way of trust is a movement into obscurity, into the undefined, into ambiguity, not into some predetermined, clearly delineated plan for the future. The next step discloses itself only out of a discernment of God acting in the desert of the present moment. The reality of naked trust is the life of the pilgrim who leaves what is nailed down, obvious, and secure, and walks into the unknown without any rational explanation to justify the decision or guarantee the future. Why? Because God has signaled the movement and offered it his presence and his promise.Collection: Reality
In Love's service, only wounded soldiers can serve.Collection: Love
If we maintain the open-mindedness of children, we challenge fixed ideas and established structures, including our own. We listen to people in other denominations and religions. We don't find demons in those with whom we disagree. We don't cozy up to people who mouth our jargon. If we are open, we rarely resort to either-or: either creation or evolution, liberty or law, sacred or secular, Beethoven or Madonna. We focus on both-and, fully aware that God's truth cannot be imprisoned in a small definition.Collection: Children
I am wonderfully content with a God who does not deal with me as my sins deserve.Collection: Doe
The deeper we grow in the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the poorer we become - the more we realize that everything in life is a gift. The tenor of our lives becomes one of humble and joyful thanksgiving. Awareness of our poverty and ineptitude causes us to rejoice in the gift of being called out of darkness into wondrous light and translated into the kingdom of God's beloved Son.Collection: Jesus
Tragedy is that our attention centers on what people are not, rather than on what they are and who they might become.Collection: People
To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side I learn who I am and what God's grace means.Collection: Mean
That which is denied cannot be healed.Collection: Denial
A saint is not someone who is good but who experiences the goodness of God.Collection: Saint
God not only loves me as I am, but also knows me as I am. Because of this I don't need to apply spiritual cosmetics to make myself presentable to Him. I can accept ownership of my poverty and powerlessness and neediness.Collection: Spiritual
God is enough. That is the root of peace. When we start seeking something besides Him, we lose it.Collection: Roots
Sheer scholarship alone cannot reveal to us the gospel of grace. We must never allow the authority of books, institutions, or leaders to replace the authority of KNOWING Jesus Christ personally and directly. When the religious views of others interpose between us and the primary experience of Jesus as the Christ, we become unconvicted and unpersuasive travel agents handing out brochures to places we have never visited.Collection: Religious
To lend each other a hand when we're falling, perhaps that's the only work that matters in the end.Collection: Fall
The temptation of the age is to look good without being good.Collection: Temptation
For those who feel their lives are a grave disappointment to God, it requires enormous trust and reckless, raging confidence to accept that the love of Jesus Christ knows no shadow of alteration or change. When Jesus said, "Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy burdened," He assumed we would grow weary, discouraged, and disheartened along the way. These words are a touching testimony to the genuine humanness of Jesus. He had no romantic notion of the cost of discipleship. He knew that following Him was as unsentimental as duty, as demanding as love.Collection: Love
Our hearts of stone become hearts of flesh when we learn where the outcast weeps.Collection: Heart
The gospel declares that no matter how dutiful or prayerful we are, we can't save ourselves. What Jesus did was sufficient.Collection: Jesus
When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt, I hope and get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am trusting and suspicious. I am honest and I still play games. Aristotle said I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer.Collection: Hate
Jesus comes for sinners, for those outcast...and those caught up in squalid choices and failed dreams.Collection: Dream
The litmus test of our love for God is our love of neighbor.Collection: Tests
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.Collection: Church
The confessing church of American Ragamuffins needs to join Magdalene and Peter in witnessing that Christianity is not primarily a moral code but a grace-laden mystery; it is not essentially a philosophy of love but a love affair; it is not keeping rules with clenched fists but receiving a gift with open hands.Collection: Philosophy
Whenever I allow anything but tenderness and compassion to dictate my response to life--be it self-righteous anger, moralizing, defensiveness, the pressing need to change others...I am alienated from my true self. My identity as Abba's child [a child of God] becomes ambiguous, tentative and confusedCollection: Children
And Grace calls out, 'You are not just a disillusioned old man who may die soon, a middle-aged woman stuck in a job and desperately wanting to get out, a young person feeling the fire in the belly begin to grow cold. You may be insecure, inadequate, mistaken or potbellied. Death, panic, depression, and disillusionment may be near you. But you are not just that. You are accepted.' Never confuse your perception of yourself with the mystery that you really are accepted.Collection: Jobs
If asked whether I am finally letting God love me, just as I am, I would answer, 'No, but I'm trying.Collection: Letting Go
The Good News of the gospel of grace cries out: We are all, equally, privileged but unentitled beggars at the door of God's mercy!Collection: Doors
The saved sinner is prostrate in adoration, lost in wonder and praise. He knows repentance is not what we do in order to earn forgiveness; it is what we do because we have been forgiven. It serves as an expression of gratitude rather than an effort to earn forgiveness. Thus the sequence of forgiveness and then repentance, rather than repentance and then forgiveness, is crucial for understanding the gospel of grace.Collection: Gratitude
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.Collection: Pain
In human beings, love is a quality, a high-prized virtue; in God, love is His identity.Collection: Love Is
What makes the Kingdom come is heartfelt compassion: a way of tenderness that knows no frontiers, no labels, no compartmentalizing, and no sectarian divisions.Collection: Compassion
Whatever we have done in the past, be it good or evil, great or small, is irrelevant to our stance before God today. It is only NOW that we are in the presence of God.Collection: Past
Christianity happens when men and women accept with unwavering trust that their sins have been not only forgiven, but forgotten, washed away in the blood of the Lamb. Thus, my friend archbishop Joe Reia says, "A sad Christian is a phony Christian, and a guilty Christian is no Christian at all.Collection: Christian
The noonday devil of the Christian life is the temptation to lose the inner self while preserving the shell of edifying behavior. Suddenly I discover that I am ministering to AIDS victims to enhance my resume. I find I renounced ice cream for Lent to lose five excess pounds... I have fallen victim to what T.S. Eliot calls the greatest sin: to do the right thing for the wrong reason.Collection: Christian
Real freedom is freedom from the opinions of others. Above all, freedom from your opinions about yourself.Collection: Real
We miss Jesus' point entirely when we use His words as weapons against others.Collection: Jesus
Won't the awareness God loves us no matter what lead to spiritual laziness and moral laxity? Theoretically, this seems a reasonable fear, but in reality the opposite is true. . . . The more rooted we are in the love of God, the more generously we will live our faith.Collection: Spiritual
Jesus was victorious not because he never flinched, talked back, or questioned, but having flinched, talked back, and questioned, he remained faithful.Collection: Jesus
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.Collection: Father
The love of Christ embraces all without exception. Fire of love, crazy over what You have made. Oh, divine Madman. (Prayer of Catherine Siena) Simply do the next thing in love. I have no sense of myself apart from you. Quia amasti me, fecisti me amabilem. (In loving me, you made me lovable.)Collection: Prayer
There is an essential connection between experiencing God, loving God, and trusting God. You will trust God only as much as you love him. And you will love him to the extent you have touched him, rather that he has touched you.Collection: Essentials
For me the most radical demand of Christian faith lies in summoning the courage to say yes to the present risenness of Jesus Christ.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Struggle
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.Collection: Grace