Quotes about Authenticity

Occasionally we see "shooting stars" in ministry—people who come out of seemingly nowhere and practically overnight are known worldwide, usually because they happened to get in with a certain group of people who had an ability to open doors for them. Rarely do their ministries last. They often get into trouble financially or morally because character is built during the hard times of waiting, but they didn't go through that character-building time.

Our lives improve only when we take chances -- and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.

It is too embarrassing to name and own one's deep failings; as long as they are unvoiced, we may be allowed to pretend it is not so.

The church will not have power to act or believe until it recovers its tradition of faith and permits that tradition to be the primal way out of enculturation. This is not a cry for traditionalism but rather a judgment that the church has no business more pressing than the reappropriation of its memory in its full power and authenticity.

Worship that does not lead to neighborly compassion and justice cannot be faithful worship of YHWH. The offer is a phony Sabbath!

But this is real prayer, down and dirty. It is not nice church prayer that refuses to ask anything because we mostly do not believe that prayers are heard or answered.

The key insight is that honest talk transforms and emancipates when it is received in faithful seriousness.

Humanness depends on being faithfully heard. And being faithfully heard depends on risky speech of self-disclosure uttered in freedom before a faithful listener.

I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories.

There is nothing in this world so hard to get at as truth, and there is nothing in this world but truth that I care for.

I know firsthand that once you've tasted the reality of God—not hype or excitement, but the great filling of His glory through your veins—your spiritual taste buds are simply ruined for anything counterfeit.

Even though I have not mastered it, I now have a better sense of what makes us want others to think well of us, and how we can prevent that desire from ruling in our hearts. False Narrative: My Value Is Determined by Your Assessment