Quotes from Larry Crabb

Face the hard questions that life requires you to ask. Gather with other travelers on the narrow road, pilgrims who acknowledge their confusion and feel their fears. Then, together, live those questions in My Presence.

There's no higher dream than experiencing God as He moves through every circumstance of life to an eternal encounter with Himself where transformed people will enjoy perfectly loving community around Jesus Christ, the source of Perfect Love.

That day has come. God is now dealing with us in a new way. Our badness is no longer the obstacle to blessing. Nor is our goodness the condition for blessing.

The pain of aloneness and pointlessness is piercing. It demands relief. That single fact — that the pain of living apart from God is unbearable — exposes our sinfulness as horribly grotesque and foolish. We insist on finding relief without coming to God on His terms.

We were designed to love and when we do, something good develops inside. We feel clean, rich, whole. Even better, we become less concerned with how we feel and more concerned with the lives of others.

It's so natural to think the Presence of Jesus has no greater purpose than to improve the quality of our journey through life—with quality defined as a pleasurable, satisfying, self-affirming existence—a journey where certain things don't go wrong or, if they do, they correct themselves. Marriages should work, biopsies should come back benign, ministry efforts should succeed, and we should feel pretty good about the way most things go.

We'll never abandon ourselves to the Spirit as long as we think we can change without Him.

The highest dream we could ever dream, the wish that if granted would make us happier than any other blessing, is to know God, to actually experience Him. The problem is that we don't believe this idea is true. We assent to it in our heads. But we don't feel it in our hearts.

Spiritual formation is relational formation. It is easier, and therefore more talked about, to practice spiritual disciplines in an effort to feel God's presence than to practice them in order to draw on the Spirit's power to love well. Spiritually forming people may or may not regularly experience God with them. But spiritually forming people will grow to increasingly reveal God's nature by how they relate.

We can't always make life work. But we can always draw near to God. There is a different way to approach our problems. There is a NEW WAY to live.