{"author":"Brennan Manning","author_id":"Brennan+Manning","total_quotes":98,"quotes":[{"text":"The Word we study has to be the Word we pray. My personal experience of the relentless tenderness of God came not from exegetes, theologians, and spiritual writers, but from sitting still in the presence of the living Word and beseeching Him to help me understand with my head and heart His written Word. 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.","author":"Brennan Manning","tags":["god","gospel","grace","jesus-christ","word"],"id":13664,"author_id":"Brennan+Manning"},{"text":"I have been seized by the power of a great affection.","author":"Brennan Manning","tags":["christianity","jesus"],"id":17220,"author_id":"Brennan+Manning"},{"text":"The humble woman is surprised by all the good that she sees around her rather than scandalized by what she cannot judge anyway. The humble woman is grateful for her successes but not disheartened by her failures. She enjoys her gifts and readily admits her mistakes. She maintains a sense of humor, whether the news from Wall Street is giddy or glum. She faces her character defects without getting discouraged. Her humble confidence in God’s love and her enchantment with the kabod Yahweh shape a hedge of thorns against self-absorption and frees her for an unselfconscious presence to others.","author":"Brennan Manning","tags":["humility","women","women-s-strength"],"id":21619,"author_id":"Brennan+Manning"},{"text":"The temptation of the age is to look good without being good.","author":"Brennan Manning","tags":["inspirational","thought-provoking"],"id":21708,"author_id":"Brennan+Manning"},{"text":"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.","author":"Brennan Manning","tags":["discipleship","god","jesus","love","trust"],"id":27431,"author_id":"Brennan+Manning"},{"text":"Though lip service is paid to the gospel of grace, many Christians live as if only personal discipline and self-denial will mold the perfect me. The emphasis is on what I do rather than on what God is doing. In this curious process God is a benign old spectator in the bleachers who cheers when I show up for morning quiet time.","author":"Brennan Manning","tags":["christianity","discipline","god"],"id":28347,"author_id":"Brennan+Manning"},{"text":"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.","author":"Brennan Manning","tags":["grace"],"id":30845,"author_id":"Brennan+Manning"},{"text":"Several times in my ministry people have expressed the fear that self-acceptance will abort the ongoing conversion process and lead to a life of spiritual laziness and moral laxity. Nothing could be more untrue. The acceptance of self does not mean to be resigned to the status quo. On the contrary, the more fully we accept ourselves, the more successfully we begin to grow. Love is a far better stimulus than threat or pressure.","author":"Brennan Manning","tags":["growth","love","self-acceptance"],"id":41598,"author_id":"Brennan+Manning"},{"text":"For Foucauld and the Little Brothers, life in the desert was not a flight from the world but rather a school of love and prayer to learn to enter more deeply into humanity. Their goal was to shout the gospel not so much with their mouths as with their lives.","author":"Brennan Manning","tags":["charles-de-foucauld","christian-living","gospel"],"id":42950,"author_id":"Brennan+Manning"},{"text":"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.","author":"Brennan Manning","tags":["christ"],"id":44138,"author_id":"Brennan+Manning"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":98,"pages":10,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}