Quotes about Authenticity

Love? Yes, God loves us. But his love is passionate and seeks faithful, committed love in return. God does not want tame pets to fondle and feed; he wants mature, free people who will respond to him in authentic individuality. For that to happen there must be honesty and truth. The self must be toppled from its pedestal. There must be pure hearts and clear intelligence, confession of sin and commitment in faith.

Spirituality means, among other things, taking ourselves seriously. It means going against the cultural stream in which we are incessantly trivialized to the menial status of producers and performers, constantly depersonalized behind the labels of our degrees or our salaries.

There is nothing more common than for people who want to talk about God to lose interest in the people they are talking to.

The church is never in so much danger as when it is popular and millions of people are saying "I'm born again, born again, born again.

Churches are not franchises to be reproduced as exactly as possible wherever and whenever—in Rome and Moscow and London and Baltimore—the only thing changed being the translation of the menu.

What good would it do to get everything you want and lose you, the real you? What could you ever trade your soul for? "If any of you are embarrassed over me and the way I'm leading you when you get around your fickle and unfocused friends, know that you'll be an even greater embarrassment to the Son of Man when he arrives in all the splendor of God, his Father, with an army of the holy angels.

Don't waste your time on useless work, mere busywork, the barren pursuits of darkness. Expose these things for the sham they are. It's a scandal when people waste their lives on things they must do in the darkness where no one will see. Rip the cover off those frauds and see how attractive they look in the light of Christ. Wake up from your sleep, Climb out of your coffins; Christ will show you the light!

Premature praise is false praise. Praise is our end but not our beginning. We begin our lives crying, not smiling and cooing and thanking our parents for bringing us into this lovely world full of dry diapers and sweet milk and warm flesh. We kick and flail. We yell and weep. We have the popularization of a kind of religion that, instead of training people to the sacrificial life after the pattern of our Lord, seduces them into having fun on weekends.

But if you're content to be simply yourself, you will become more than yourself.

David's isn't an ideal life but an actual life.

We are most ourselves when we love; we are most the People of God when we love.

But we do know that much of what we commonly describe as Christian behavior is not volitional at all—it is enforced. But worship is not forced. Everyone who worships does so because he or she wants to.