Brennan Manning Quotes

At Sunday worship, as in every dimension of our existence, many of us pretend to believe we are sinn...

For several centuries, the Celtic church of Ireland was spared the Greek dualism of matter and spiri...

The noonday devil of the Christian life is the temptation to lose the inner self while preserving th...

How I treat a brother or sister from day to day, how I react to the sin-scarred wino on the street, ...

The sinners to whom Jesus directed His messianic ministry were not those who skipped morning devotio...

What makes authentic disciples is not visions, ecstasies, biblical mastery of chapter and verse, or ...

The beauty of the ragamuffin gospel lies in the insight it offers into Jesus: the essential tenderne...

The gospel declares that no matter how dutiful or prayerful we are, we can't save ourselves. What Je...

God's love is based on nothing, and the fact that it is based on nothing makes us secure. Were it ba...

Everybody has a vocation to some form of life-work. However, behind that call (and deeper than any c...

Real freedom is freedom from the opinions of others. Above all, freedom from your opinions about you...

Stop comparing or boast at your victories. He was referring to enormous vitality and strength of God...

* Recognize that God is with you.* Acknowledge God knows what He's doing.* Search for God's will: th...

Often people request prayers for deliverance, inner healing, or physical healing. But more frequentl...

Lord, when I feel that what I'm doing is insignificant and unimportant, help me to remember that eve...

The way of trust is a movement into obscurity, into the undefined, into ambiguity, not into some pre...

What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.' A. W. Tozer...

Julian of Norwich...wrote: 'Some of us believe that God is almighty and can do everything; and that ...

[author quoting from his journal entry] "To feel safe is to stop living in my head and sink down int...

For Foucauld and the Little Brothers, life in the desert was not a flight from the world but rather ...

But if I've learned anything about the world of grace, it's that failure is always a chance for a do...

Drinking gave me a rush of confidence, and for a boy hounded by feelings of inadequacy, the buzz was...

On one level, a roomful of men is always a dangerous thing. Competition is usually in the air, so th...

In Love's service, only wounded soldiers can serve.

Silent solitude makes true speech possible and personal. If I am not in touch with my own belovednes...

In a futile attempt to erase our past, we deprive the community of our healing gift. If we conceal o...

The engaged mind, illuminated by truth, awakens awareness; the engaged heart, affected by love, awak...

Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illu...

[The] insistence on the absolutely indiscriminate nature of compassion within the Kingdom is the dom...

Live in the wisdom of accepted tenderness. Tenderness awakens within the security of knowing we are ...

Our hearts of stone become hearts of flesh when we learn where the outcast weeps.

The sorrow of God lies in our fear of Him, our fear of life, and our fear of ourselves. He anguishes...

we unwittingly project onto God our own attitudes and feelings toward ourselves... But we cannot ass...

Our identity rests in God's relentless tenderness for us revealed in Jesus Christ.

While the impostor draws his identity from past achievements and the adulation of others, the true s...

For me the most radical demand of Christian faith lies in summoning the courage to say yes to the pr...

The life of Jesus suggests that to be like Abba is to show compassion. Donald Gray expresses this: "...

The unwounded life bears no resemblance to the Rabbi.

In my experience, self-hatred is the dominant malaise crippling Christians and stifling their growth...

As we come to grips with our own selfishness and stupidity, we make friends with the impostor and ac...

To ignore, repress, or dismiss our feelings is to fail to listen to the stirrings of the Spirit with...

We can only sense ourselves and our world valued and cherished by God when we feel valued and cheris...

Suffering, failure, loneliness, sorrow, discouragement, and death will be part of your journey, but ...

Ruthless trust ultimately comes down to this: faith in the person of Jesus and hope in his promise.

God loves you unconditionally, as you are and not as you should be, because nobody is as they should...

The dominant characteristic of an authentic spiritual life is the gratitude that flows from trust - ...

A man doesn't grow old because he has lived a certain number of years. A man grows old when he deser...

The forgiveness of God is gratuitous liberation from guilt. Paradoxically, the conviction of persona...

Childlike surrender and trust, I believe, is the defining spirit of authentic discipleship.

The humble woman is surprised by all the good that she sees around her rather than scandalized by wh...

Sin and forgiveness and falling and getting back up and losing the pearl of great price in the couch...

To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting...

By and large, the gospel of grace is neither proclaimed, understood, nor lived.

I want neither a terrorist spirituality that keeps me in a perpetual state of fright about being in ...

Trust is that rare and priceless treasure that wins us the affection of our heavenly Father.

My trust in God flows out of the experience of his loving me, day in and day out, whether the day is...

Too many Christians are living in a house of fear and not in the house of love.

The ragamuffin who sees his life as a voyage of discovery and runs the risk of failure has a better ...

Genuine self-acceptance is not derived from the power of positive thinking, mind games or pop psycho...

One spiritual writer has observed that human beings are born with two diseases: life, from which we ...

The only cure for suffering is to face it head on, grasp it round the neck and use it.

Because salvation is by grace through faith, I believe that among the countless number of people sta...

The fierce words of Jesus addressed to the Pharisees of His day stretch across the bands of time. To...

There is an essential connection between experiencing God, loving God, and trusting God. You will tr...

The temptation of the age is to look good without being good.

Several times in my ministry people have expressed the fear that self-acceptance will abort the ongo...

And though it is true that the church must always dissociate itself from sin, it can never have any ...

Assured of your salvation by the unique grace of our Lord Jesus Christ" is the heartbeat of the gosp...

Suffering, failure, loneliness, sorrow, discouragement, and death will be part of your journey, but ...

The ragamuffin gospel says we can't lose, because we have nothing to lose.

Though lip service is paid to the gospel of grace, many Christians live as if only personal discipli...

For Ragamuffins, God's name is Mercy. We see our darkness as a prized possession because it drives u...

For those who feel their lives are a grave disappointment to God, it requires enormous trust and rec...

The Word we study has to be the Word we pray. My personal experience of the relentless tenderness of...

Creation discloses a power that baffles our minds and beggars our speech. We are enamored and enchan...

Imagine that Jesus is calling you today. He extends a second invitation to accept His Father's love....

The ragamuffin gospel reveals that Jesus forgives sins, including the sins of the flesh; that He is ...

I have been seized by the power of a great affection.

Sheer scholarship alone cannot reveal to us the gospel of grace. We must never allow the authority o...

The story goes that a public sinner was excommunicated and forbidden entry to the church. He took hi...

This is the God of the gospel of grace. A God who, out of love for us, sent the only Son He ever had...

The deeper we grow in the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the poorer we become - the more we realize that ev...

We must go out into a desert of some kind (your backyard will do) and come into a personal experienc...

Ragamuffins are simple, direct and honest. Their speech is unaffected. They are slow to claim, "God ...

The saved sinner is prostrate in adoration, lost in wonder and praise. He knows repentance is not wh...

Charles de Foucauld, the found of the Little Brothers of Jesus, wrote a single sentence that's ahad ...

Authentic faith leads us to treat others with unconditional seriousness and to a loving reverence fo...

Those who have the disease called Jesus will never be cured.

And Grace calls out, 'You are not just a disillusioned old man who may die soon, a middle-aged woman...

When we accept ourselves for what we are, we decrease our hunger for power or the acceptance of othe...

Grace abounds in contemporary movies, books, novels, films and music. If God is not in the whirlwind...

The gospel of grace nullifies our adulation of televangelists, charismatic superstars, and local chu...

Jesus was victorious not because he never flinched, talked back, or questioned, but having flinched,...

One of the the loveliest lines I have ever read comes from Brother Roger, the Prior of the Protestan...

When a person is evoked for who she is, not who she is not, the most often result will be the inner ...

The gospel is absurd and the life of Jesus is meaningless unless we believe that He lived, died, and...

I've decided that if I had my life to live over again, I would not only climb more mountains, swim m...

Without exposure to potential failure, there is no risk.