Quotes from John Eldredge

The truth of the gospel is intended to free us to love God and others with our whole heart. When we ignore this heart aspect of our faith and try to live out our religion solely as correct doctrine or ethics, our passion is crippled, or perverted, and the divorce of our soul from the heart purposes of God toward us is deepened.

If you do not know the power of his indwelling life in you, shaping your personality, healing your brokenness, enabling you to live as he did—you have been plundered. This is why we pray

I'll let you in on a little secret: your heart is made for the kingdom of God. This might be the most important thing anyone will ever tell you about yourself: your heart only thrives in one habitat, and that safe place is called the kingdom of God.

The moment of perceiving something beautiful confers on the perceiver the gift of life.

The first line grabs me by the throat. "Therefore we do not lose heart." Somebody knows how not to lose heart? I'm all ears. For we are losing heart. All of us. Daily. It is the single most unifying quality shared by the human race on the planet at this time. We are losing—or we have already lost—heart.

The hardest, gladdest thing in the world is to cry Father! from a full heart... the refusal to look up to God as our father is the one central wrong in the whole human affair; the inability, the one central misery.

This is the time for a young man to stop saying, "Why is life so hard?" He takes the hardness as the call to fight, to rise up, take it on.

We reframe everything by one simple choice: I am accepting God's invitation to become a man. From there we interpret jobs, money, relationships, flat tires, bad dates, even our play time as the context in which the boy is becoming a man. We take an active role, asking our Father to speak to us, speak to our identity, to validate us. We step into our fears and accept "hardship as discipline.

We would like to picture goodness as being synonymous with safety.

When your phone chirps or vibrates, don't react. Make it wait till you pick it up. In these small ways I'm making my phone a tool again, something that serves me instead of the other way around.

In the middle of the road of my life, I awoke in a dark wood, where the true way was wholly lost.

The great divide lies between men as lovers and men as consumers. Does he seek her out, long for her, because really he yearns for her to meet some need in his life—a need for validation (she makes him feel like a man), or mercy, or simply sexual gratification? That man is a Consumer, as my friend Craig calls him. The lover, on the other hand, wants to fight for her—he wants to protect her, make her life better, wants to fill her heart in every way he can.