Brennan Manning Quotes

Surely the principles of Christianity lead to action as well as meditation.

Were there a Christian so faithful to his God as I was to her we would all be Jesus Christ today.

You can't be loved for long if you're not feared.

If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him.

Christianity means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ. No Christian community is more or less than this.

The whole being of any Christian is faith and love. Faith brings the person to God, love brings the person to people.

More people have been brought into the church by the kindness of real Christian love than by all the theological arguments in the world.

God is love, and that love works through men-especially through the whole community of Christians.

I do understand what love is, and that is one of the reasons I can never again be a Christian. Love is not self denial. Love is not blood and suffering. Love is not murdering your son to appease your own vanity. Love is not hatred or wrath, consigning billions of people to eternal torture because they have offended your ego or disobeyed your rules. Love is not obedience, conformity, or submission. It is a counterfeit love that is contingent upon authority, punishment, or reward. True love is respect and admiration, compassion and kindness, freely given by a healthy, unafraid human being.

Good Christian liturgy is friendship in action, love taking thought, the covenant relationship between God and his people not simply discovered and celebrated like the sudden meeting of friends, exciting and worthwhile though that is, but thought through and relished, planned and prepared -- an ultimately better way for the relationship to grow and at the same time a way of demonstrating what the relationship is all about.

There are two things we cannot do alone. One is to be married and the other is to be a Christian.

A Christian is one who recognizes Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God, as God manifested in the flesh, loving us and dying for our redemption; and who is so affected by a sense of the love of this incarnate God as to be constrained to make the will of Christ the rule of his obedience, and the glory of Christ the great end for which He lives.

Every Christian family ought to be as it were a little church.

Jesus is challenging that when addressing "who is your neighbor" and he has a lot of hard things to say about family, "unless you hate your own family you are not going to be a disciple." He is challenging the limits of our compassion and our love as if someone's kid suffers it should be as devastating to us as if it were our own kid. That is what the early church said.

I don't know how people can easily remain Christian if they get no fellowship. They may be able to do it intellectually, but part of the body of man is composed of spirit and parts of soul and of flesh.

Make disciples. Surround them in the reality of the Trinity in a fellowship of disciples. Teach them to do everything Jesus says.

The true ground of most men's prejudice against the Christian doctrine is because they have no mind to obey it.

The key word in the church community is relationships, you know brother and sister in Christ.

The will of a wealthy New York woman, in addition to distributing her worldly goods to her children, left them the following advice: Love one another. Hold fast to that whether you understand one another or not, and remember nothing really matters except being kind to one another in the name of Christ and to all the world as far as you can reach.

God hates loneliness, and community is God's answer to loneliness. When we walk alongside other people, we find a community where we learn how to love.

The Bible recognizes no faith that does not lead to obedience, nor does it recognize any obedience that does not spring from faith. The two are at opposite sides of the same coin.

Principles are what people have instead of God. To be a Christian means among other things to be willing if necessary to sacrifice even your highest principles for God's or your neighbour's sake the way a Christian pacifist must be willing to pick up a baseball bat if there's no other way to stop a man from savagely beating a child. Jesus didn't forgive his executioners on principle but because in some unimaginable way he was able to love them. 'Principle' is an even duller word than 'Religion'.

I am a Christian, not because someone explained the nuts and bolts of Christianity, but because there were people willing to be nuts and bolts.

Love is a bodily shape; and Christian works are no more than animate faith and love, as flowers are the animate springtide.

none can be Tyrants but Cowards.