I was not planning on reading this book yesterday, but for whatever reason (I believe God’s reason), I decided to pick it up. Turned out to be a timely book that spoke deeply into my life. Although I didn’t agree with everything, below are the quotes that stuck out like a light in darkened places in my soul.
“For His love is never, never, never based on our performance, never conditioned by our moods – of elation or depression. The furious love of God knows no shadow of alteration or change. It is reliable. And always tender.”
“The love of Christ is beyond knowledge.”
“Rather than being appalled by the discontinuity between the poetic and interesting and the prosaic and mundane, it serves well to fasten on the utter delight of a loving God who is deeply touched that, in the brouhaha of your busy life, you would devote even five minutes to spiritual reading.”
“The love of Christ embraces all without exception.”
“He seeks nothing less than union.”
“Are we responding to the love of Jesus living within us concretely and consistently in our love for one another?”
“If we continue to view ourselves as moral lepers and spiritual failures, if our lives are shadowed by low self-esteem, shame, remorse, unhealthy guilt, and self-hatred, we reject the teaching of Jesus and cling to our negative self-image.”
“Healing becomes the opportunity to pass of to another human being what I have received from the Lord Jesus; namely His unconditional acceptance of me as I am, not as I should be. He loves me whether in a state of grace or disgrace, whether I live up to the lofty expectations of His gospel or I don’t. He comes to me where I live and loves me as I am.”
“When I have passed that same reality on to another human being, the result most often has been the inner healing of their heart through the touch of my affirmation. 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.”
“You have the power to give someone the courage to be.”
“The question is not can we heal? The question, the only question, is will we let the healing power of the risen Jesus flow through us to reach and touch others, so that they may dream and fight and bear and run where the brace dare not go?”
“In the presence of the king, don’t ask for small gifts.”
He did not come to bring peace, but a revolution.
“We are to strip ourselves of earthly cares and worldly wisdom, all desire for human praise, greediness for any kind of comfort, spiritual consolations included. The gospel is a summons to be stripped of those fine pretenses by which we manage to paint a portrait of ourselves for the admiration of friends.”
“Is that why Jesus went through the bleak and bloody horror of Calvary?… To make nicer men and women with better morals?”
