Quotes about Surrender

My wheelchair was the key to seeing all this happen—especially since God's power always shows up best in weakness. So here I sit … glad that I have not been healed on the outside, but glad that I have been healed on the inside. Healed from my own self-centered wants and wishes.

Joni discovered the best way to put the halter on her horse without being animal resisting and fleeing was to turn her back until he nuzzled up to her. At that point, she could slip the halter on. Just so, she surmises, sometimes God waits for us to turn our backs on what we desire most and to trust Him.

The unsound convert takes Christ by halves. He is all for the salvation of Christ, but is not for sanctification. He is for the privileges, but does not appropriate the person of Christ.

The success and the failure are not my concern, but His.

You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you.

I shall try to help You, God, to stop my strength ebbing away, though I cannot vouch for it in advance. But one thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that You cannot help us, that we must help You to help ourselves.

The assumption of spirituality is that always God is doing something before I know it. So the task is not to get God to do something I think needs to be done, but to become aware of what God is doing so that I can respond to it and participate and take delight in it.

We can decide to live in response to the abundance of God and not under the dictatorship of our own poor needs.

Left to ourselves we turn God into an object, something we can deal with, some thing we can use to our benefit, whether that thing is a feeling or an idea or an image.

Resurrection does not have to do exclusively with what happens after we are buried or cremated. It does have to do with that, but first of all it has to do with the way we live right now. But as Karl Barth, quoting Nietzsche, pithily reminds us: "Only where graves are is there resurrection." We practice our death by giving up our will to live on our own terms. Only in that relinquishment or renunciation are we able to practice resurrection.

You're blessed when you're at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule.

Steep your life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions. Don't worry about missing out. You'll find all your everyday human concerns will be met.