Love & Grace- Part 1

I'm reading out of a couple of books right now: "Entirety: Love Gives All" By: Dana Candler and The Ragamuffin Gospel By: Brennan Manning.
I would like to share some quotes that I grabbed out of my reading-----

The Ragamuffin Gospel

"We believe that we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps---- indeed, we can do it ourselves. Sooner of later we are confronted with the painful truth of our inadequacy and insufficiency. Our security is shattered and our bootstraps are cut. Once the fervor has passed, weakness and infidelity appear. We discover our inability to add even a single inch to our spiritual stature."


"My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it."


"Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: 'You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted.' If that happens to us, we experience grace."


"Never confuse your perception of yourself with the mystery that you really are accepted."


Entirety: Love Gives All

"As He gives His life entirely, He invites me to give my life entirely, and in this mutual emptying, there is great convergence. Herein, we find the union of God and man."


"God is love and this we know, but before you and I were brought into the knowledge of this God that we love, this God that has first loved us, He was love from everlasting. He was love from before time. Love unending and love all-consuming. And this love, that was Himself, was a billowing violent flow between Father, Son, and Spirit. Love unyielding, unwavering, untiring, and unrelenting. And though our minds are fractured and frail and our hearts distant and far, though we know that this eternal exchange is beyond our comprehension and surpassing our understanding, what we know in certainty of the nature of this love is that from eternity ti is a love that pours itself our wholly and entirely (Eph. 3:19). We know and recognize love by the face that it always wears, the essential quality that it always exudes: the laying down of itself on behalf of another (I John 3:16)."

"Creating mankind in His image, He carved within every human soul the yearning to be loved wholly and to love wholly, even the capacity to love Him with the very same love He has loved us (John 17:26)."