Brennan Manning Quotes

It's been a constant struggle with my athletic career to identify myself as a child of God and understand that His love is unconditional for us; it's not conditional like fans, or coaches, or even myself.

This sounds really weird, but I feel like God has given me so many beauty dilemmas so I can help people.

I would say I was always very ambitious and goal-oriented, but rather than being just a go-getter hustler, now I surrender a lot more and I trust my path a lot more.

There is so much temptation to hold on to my career even more now. To try to micromanage and dictate every little aspect. But that's not how I want to do things anymore. I'm thinking about how can I trust God more. How can I surrender more? How can I bring him more glory? It's a fight. But it's one I'm going to keep fighting.

I always believed in God and Christ, but I was in rebellion - trying to make my relationship with God fit into my life instead of making my life fit in with him. I was stubborn.

Allowing myself to love God completely has obviously shed light on my self-love because he loves me more than I could ever love myself.

When you turn your life over to God, you don't give up the drama; you give up the cheap drama.

Satan wants us to constantly focus on everything that is wrong with us and look at how far we still have to go. But God desires for us to rejoice in how far we have already come.

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a godly person. Yet when I look at the yesterdays of my life, what I see, mostly, is a broken, irregular path littered with mistakes and failure. I have had temporary successes and isolated moments of closeness to God, but I long for the continuing presence of Jesus.

Men are not born saints with special gifts and privileges. They fight against the world, the flesh and the devil, and as they conquer, the spirit of Jesus begins to shine through with more clarity.

I am keen on a spiritual life and have struggled to find a place for my heart in a religious community.

Infinite Love is who we really are and who we refuse to be. This refusal is our most essential tension.

When you finally accept that you're a complete dork, your life gets easier. No sense in trying to be cool.

I had to be healed of my desire to be healed.

All I have to tell you about is what I have heard and seen of Jesus, how He is helping me find freedom, to occasionally love other people, and even accept myself with all my mixed motives.

Spirituality isn't about being finished and perfect; spirituality is about trusting God in our unfinishedness.

I think that we come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly. Raise kids. Have a good life. Be a good friend. And try to be completely who you are.

Today, I will let go. I will stop trying to control everything. I will stop trying to make myself be and do better, and I will let myself be.

The song "No Fairy Tale" tells my story. Going through the hard things leads to a richer life than just trying to make everything perfect, or worse, pretending things are good when they don't feel right. I've done that more than enough times.

The reason why many are still troubled, still seeking, still making little forward progress is because they haven't yet come to the end of themselves. We're still trying to give orders, and interfering with God's work within us.

As I read the Bible, it seems clear that God satisfies his "eternal appetite" by loving individual human beings. I imagine He views each halting step forward in my spiritual "walk" with the eagerness of a parent watching a child take the very first step.

The sad thing is that many of us come to Christ because we are sinners, and then spend the rest of our lives trying to pretend that we are not!

I thought when I became a Christian I had nothing to do but just to lay my oars in the bottom of the boat and float along. But I soon found that I would have to go against the current.

Once an old woman at my church said the secret is that God loves us exactly the way we are and that he loves us too much to let us stay like this, and I'm just trying to trust that.

The greatest achievement to any human being is to love God, yourself, and others.