Quotes from Brennan Manning

Rationalization begins with a look in the mirror.

Into this rushing stream, Brennan's plea is evergreen: Live by grace and not by performance. In other words—let God love you. And should you see me out and about somewhere and ask me how I'm personally doing with that, I would answer as my friend so often did: I'm trying.

If our faith is alive and luminous, we will be alert to moments, events and occasions when the power of the resurrection is brought to bear on our lives.

In most testimonies the good news is only a small part of the story, obscured by our achieving and overcoming. In Brennan's story, and in mine, the good news is the entire story, which blessedly leaves us with nothing to prove or protect.

Preoccupation with self is always a major component of unhealthy guilt and recrimination.

If we let the Lion of Judah run loose as Lord of our lives, He will not want us to be poor, broken or sad. Yet He may allow it, knowing that in these conditions we are more likely to let Him make us rich, whole and happy.

Abba, You stretch wide Your loving arms to me in the darkest, loneliest moments of my life.

We project into the Lord our own measured standard of acceptance. Our whole understanding of him is based in a quid pro quo of bartered love. He will love us if we are good, moral, and diligent. But we have turned the tables; we try to live so that he will love us, rather than living because he has already loved us.

I know you will get disgruntled at times and start to act out, but the longer you spend time in the presence of Jesus, the more accustomed you grow to His face, the less adulation you will need because you will have discovered for yourself that He is Enough. And in the Presence, you will delight in the discovery of what it means to live by grace and not by performance.

The cardinal rule in prayer remains the dictum of Don Chapman: "Pray as you can; don't pray as you can't.

The demands of forgiveness are so daunting that they seem humanly impossible. The demands of forgiveness are simply beyond the capacity of ungraced human will. Only reckless confidence in a Source greater than ourselves can empower us to forgive the wounds inflicted by others. In boundary moments such as these there is only one place to go—Calvary.

My indwelling pharisee has devised a way to disembowel my true self, deny my humanity, and camouflage my emotions through a fraudulent mental maneuver called "spiritualizing.