Top Ten Quotes: You Are What You Love
Several years ago a friend introduced me to James K.A. Smith’s You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit. The quote he shared led to this post about how preparation and anticipation can lead to transformation.
I finally bit the bullet and bought the book to actually read the thing myself. I wasn’t disappointed. Smith helps us to understand how rehabituating our loves rehabituates not only what we do, but who we are.
Here are my top ten favorite quotes:
- You are what you love because you live toward what you want.
- if you are what you love, and love is a habit, then discipleship is a rehabituation of your loves.
- …we unconsciously learn to love rival kingdoms because we don’t realize we’re participating in rival liturgies.
- Worship is the arena in which God recalibrates our hearts, reforms our desires, and rehabituates our loves.
- To be conformed to the image of his Son is not only to think God’s thoughts after him but to desire what God desires.
- Christian worship should tell a story that makes us want to set sail for the immense sea that is the Triune God, birthing in us a longing for “a better country—a heavenly one” that is kingdom come.
- …we are both incubators and defenders of our children’s hearts and minds, stewards of their imaginations, responsible for their instruction. And thus it is only natural that we should be their defenders, on guard like sentinels watching in the distance for oncoming threats.
- …service has a formative effect: it blunts our cultural practices of self-consciousness and self-regarding, pulling us out of the swirling eddies of our narcissism to an other-regarding concern.
- Our engagement with God’s world is not about running the show or winning a culture war. We are called to be witnesses, not necessarily winners.
- God doesn’t simply propel us; he also attracts us. We pursue what we love.
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