The Life You've Always Wanted: Spiritual Disciplines for Ordinary People

Love and hurry are fundamentally incompatible. Love always takes time, and time is the one thing hurried people don't have.

I am disappointed with myself. I am disappointed not so much with the particular things I have done as with the aspects of who I have become. I have a nagging sense that all is not as it should be.

According to a much-traveled analogy, if we put a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will immediately hop out. But put the frog in water that’s at room temperature and heat it slowly, and the creature will stay there until it boils to death. Put him in a lethal environment suddenly, and he will escape. But introduce the danger gradually, and he will never notice. The truth is that the dangers to which we are most vulnerable are generally not the sudden, dramatic, obvious ones. They are the ones that creep up on us, that are so much a part of our environment that we don’t even notice them.

One of the great illusions of our day is that hurrying will buy us more time.

We have largely traded wisdom for information, depth for breadth. We want to microwave maturity.

When asked to identify what the law is about, Jesus’ response was simply “Love God, love people.” He named a fundamentally different way of identifying who are the children of God: “Do they love God, and do they love the people who mean so much to him?

We are not the passive victim of others' opinions. Their opinions are powerless until we validate them.

...sin is often the attempt to meet a legitimate need in an illegitimate way.

God's great, holy joke about the messiah complex is this: Every human being who has ever lived has suffered from it--except one. And he was the Messiah.

For many of us the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it. We will just skim our lives instead of actually living them.

When you’re in your twenties, someone once wrote, you live to please other people. When you’re in your thirties, you get tired of trying to please others, so you get miffed with them for making you worry about it. When you’re in your forties, you realize nobody was thinking about you anyway.

Pride moves us to bow down before a mirror rather than before God.

If you want to be your own god, you have to settle for living in a tiny universe where there is room for only one person.

We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glowworm. WINSTON CHURCHILL

Biblical prayer is impertinent, persistent, shameless, indecorous. It is more like haggling in an oriental bazaar than the polite monologues of the churches.

Spiritual discipline: Any activity that can help me gain power to live life as Jesus taught and modeled it.

Prayer, perhaps more than any other activity, is the concrete expression of the fact that we are invited into a relationship with God.

None of us may ever know the true effects of our prayers this side of death. But we do know this: History belongs to the intercessors.

Love and hurry are fundamentally incompatible.

Joy is God’s basic character. Joy is his eternal destiny. God is the happiest being in the universe.

One of the hardest things in the world is to stop being the prodigal son without turning into the elder brother.

But to grow spiritually means to live increasingly as Jesus would in our unique place—to perceive what Jesus would perceive if he looked through our eyes, to think what he would think, to feel what he would feel, and therefore to do what he would do.

The primary goal of spiritual life is human transformation. It is not making sure people know where they’re going after they die

For many years I was bothered by the thought that I was a failure at prayer. Then one day I realized I would always be a failure at prayer; and I’ve gotten along much better ever since.

There is more good news in that our season of life is not a barrier to spiritual growth. A mother in our small group suggested that it was easier for her to “work on her spiritual life” before she became a mom. As we talked, it became clear what she meant. To her, reading the Bible and praying were the only two activities that counted spiritually. As a mother she felt that “time alone” was an oxymoron. In this the church had failed her. She had never been taught to see that caring for two young children, offered daily with expressions of gratitude and prayers for help and patient acceptance of trials, might become a kind of school for transformation into powerful servanthood beyond anything she had ever known. Somehow having a “quiet time” counted toward spiritual devotion, and caring for two children did not. It took creative effort for this mother to carve out time for solitude and stillness, and even then she could not free up the amount of time she had in college. But as a mother she had new opportunities for growth she did not have back then. Our season of life — whatever it is — is no barrier to having Christ formed in us. Not in the least. Whatever our season of life, it offers its own opportunities and challenges for spiritual growth. Instead of wishing we were in another season, we ought to find out what this one offers. Life counts — all of it. Every moment is potentially an opportunity to be guided by God into his way of living. Every moment is a chance to learn from Jesus how to live in the kingdom of God.

Earth’s crammed with Heaven, And every common bush afire with God, But only he who sees takes off his shoes — The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

The character of the faith that allows us to be transformed by suffering and darkness is not doubt-free certainty; rather, it is tenacious obedience.

I remember how at night I didn’t have slow, sweet talks, but merely rushed the children to bed so I could have more time to myself.