Quotes about Self-reflection

If you aren't daily admitting to yourself that you are a mess and in daily and rather desperate need for forgiving and transforming grace, and if the evidence around has not caused you to abandon your confidence in your own righteousness, then you are going to give yourself to the work of convincing yourself that you are okay.

You will always deny your need for God's grace when you are more irritated than convicted. It's possible to be irritated with things in other people that you regularly excuse in yourself.

All their commitments to change have been subverted by the one thing they seem unwilling to do: take the focus off the other and put it on themselves. Here is the point: no change takes place in a marriage that does not begin with confession.

Here's how confession works. You cannot confess what you haven't grieved, you can't grieve what you do not see, and you cannot repent of what you have not confessed. So one of the most important operations of God's grace is to give us eyes to see our sin and hearts that are willing to confess it.

They were convinced that they had made the mistake of marrying a messed-up person; they were convinced that the other had made them do things they would not otherwise have done; and they were convinced that they had no power to make the other change, although they had tried.

There is no need to be paralyzed by the opinions of another. God gives you the ultimate tool of self-assessment, the mirror of his Word.

anger is always an issue of the heart before it is an act of physical aggression.

It is humbling to admit, but I have had to face the fact that the greatest danger to my ministry is me!

It's natural to want mercy for yourself but justice for others. It's natural to be very aware of the sin others, yet blind to your own. If we are ever going to be people of mercy, we need bountiful mercy ourselves, because what stands in the way of our being a community of mercy is us.

This means that my biggest, ongoing problem as a dad is not my children, it's me.

when you blame other people for your circumstances or for the wrongs that you do, you are, in fact, blaming God. You are saying that God didn't give you what you needed to be what he has called you to be and to do what he has called you to do.

You and I need to say it to ourselves again and again. We need to look in the mirror and make the confession as part of our morning routine. Here's what we all need to say: "I am not a grace graduate.