Top Ten Quotes: Surrender to Love
A friend and I have been working through David Benner’s Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality. If you’re a fan of Gentle and Lowly, it echoes with the theme of understanding God’s grace and love for us.
It’s a short book – clocking in at just over 100 pages – and one that I found immensely helpful in my own walk. Particularly, Benner’s invitation to simply soak in a passage of scripture provided the background for this recent post.
Here are my top ten favorite quotes:
- …the self that begins the spiritual journey is not the same as the one that ends it.
- God’s love is never compromised by anger. The presence of anger does not mean the absence of love – particularly in God.
- The story of Jesus is the story of love personified. We miss the point when we simply try to do what he tells us to do.
- If God is love, he cannot be truly known apart from love. He cannot, therefore, be known objectively.
- …God’s first words to us are “Fear not.” This is not a command but an invitation.
- …surrender provides the motive for obedience. We should obey God because he has won our hearts in love.
- Surrender to love is never a once-for-all done deal.
- Our failures to live up to even our own expectations and ideals are massive. Our failures to live up to God’s expectations are profound.
- Human love, no matter how noble, is always contaminated to some extent by self-interest.
- Love always involves not just saying yes to someone but also saying no to self. The life of love is a life of death to the kingdom of self.
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