It is not objective proof of God’s existence that we want but the experience of God’s presence. That is the miracle we are really after, and that is also, I think, the miracle that we really get.6.
I am flabbergasted by the widespread refusal across this land to think big about a loving God. Like nervous thoroughbreds being guided to the starting gate at Churchill Downs, many Christians bray, bridle, and bolt at the revelation of God’s all-embracing love in Jesus Christ.
We need a new kind of relationship with the Father that drives out fear and mistrust and anxiety and guilt, that permits us to be hopeful and joyous, trusting and compassionate.
Larry Hein, who wrote the blessing: 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 Father, Son, and Spirit.
When belonging to an elite group eclipses the love of God, when I draw life and meaning from any source other than my belovedness, I am spiritually dead. When God gets relegated to second place behind any bauble or trinket, I have swapped the pearl of great price for painted fragments of glass.
We even refuse to be our true self with God- and then wonder why we lack intimacy with him.
God loves you unconditionally, as you are and not as you should be, because nobody is as they should be.
A saint is not someone who is good but who experiences the goodness of God.
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.
The gospel declares that no matter how dutiful or prayerful we are, we can’t save ourselves. What Jesus did was sufficient.
Our identity rests in God’s relentless tenderness for us revealed in Jesus Christ.
I could more easily contain Niagara Falls in a teacup than I can comprehend the wild, uncontainable love of God.
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.
God is enough. That is the root of peace. When we start seeking something besides Him, we lose it.
The Christian with depth is the person who has failed and who has learned to live with it.
Trust is our gift back to God, and he finds it so enchanting that Jesus died for love of it.
That which is denied cannot be healed.
The first step in faith is to stop thinking about God at the time of prayer.-.
Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion.
Suffering, failure, loneliness, sorrow, discouragement, and death will be part of your journey, but the Kingdom of God will conquer all these horrors. No evil can resist grace forever.