Quotes from Timothy S. Lane

When you seek to define who you are through those relationships, you are actually asking another sinner to be your personal messiah, to give you the inward rest of soul that only God can give. Only when I have sought my identity in the proper place (in my relationship with God) am I able to put you in the proper place as well. When I relate to you knowing that I am God's child and the recipient of his grace, I am able to serve and love you.

What is a relationship? The intersection of the stories of two people. The problem is that an awful lot of carnage takes place at this intersection.

Legalism is not just a reduction of the gospel, it is another gospel altogether (see Galatians), where salvation is earned by keeping the rules we have established.

Our relationships are often harmed when we try to atone for our own sins while condemning the other person for his.

Only when you accept the bad news of the gospel does the good news make any sense. The grace, restoration, reconciliation, forgiveness, mercy, patience, power, healing, and hope of the gospel are for sinners. They are only meaningful to you if you admit that you have the disease and realize that it is terminal.

We think, How much better life would be if a certain situation or a relationship were different! Meanwhile, God says that what needs change most is us! He does not just work to fix situations and relationships; he is intent on rescuing us from ourselves. We are the focus of his loving, lifelong work of change.

Remember, your relationships have not been designed by God as vehicles for human happiness, but as instruments of redemption.

Christ gives us all we need to draw nearer to him and enjoy him amid difficulties and blessings. We may get tired, but not despondent. We will be sad, but not hopeless. We will endure pain, but we will not give up. We will enjoy blessings, but not grow proud. We see that our lives do not consist only in what we have, how we feel, or what we have accomplished, but in who we are in Christ. This enables us to stand where we would once have fallen down.

But the Bible teaches again and again that our circumstances don't cause us to act as we do. They only expose the true condition of our hearts, revealed in our words and actions.

The decision to forgive is first a heart transaction between you and God. It is a willingness to give up your desire to hold onto (and in some way punish the person for) his offense against you. Instead, you entrust the person and the offense to God, believing that he is righteous and just. You make a decision to respond to this person with an attitude of grace and forgiveness.

It is easy to forget the impact our words have on every relationship. There has never been a good relationship without good communication. And there has never been a bad relationship that didn't get that way in part because of something that was said.

holding onto an offense will make you a bitter and unloving person, and you will inevitably damage all your relationships.

Words separate you from the rest of creation, making you more like God than like animals.

Weak and needy people finding their hope in Christ's grace are what mark a mature relationship. The most dangerous aspect of your relationships is not your weakness, but your delusions of strength. Self-reliance is almost always a component of a bad relationship. While

When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now.

The fact that our relationships work as well as they do is a sure sign of grace

Conflict with others is one of God's mysterious, counterintuitive ways of rescuing us from ourselves. God uses it to get us where he wants to take us before we die. Because we don't usually think that trials can be used in such a positive way, this truth catches us by surprise. But it shouldn't.

It's inevitable. If you live with other sinners, you will have conflict. The closer you are to someone, the more potential there is for conflict. Relationships are costly, but so is avoiding them.

Much of the disappointment and heartache we experience is the result of our attempts to get something from relationships that we already have in Christ.

No human being was ever meant to be the source of personal joy and contentment for someone else. And surely, no sinner is ever going to be able to pull that off day after day in the all-encompassing relationship of marriage!

Whenever you believe that the evil outside you is greater than the evil inside you, a heartfelt pursuit of Christ will be replaced by a zealous fighting of the "evil" around you.

We are fallen dreamers, who dream of better worlds than the one in which we live. But the dreams we envision are often more about our own agenda than they are about our Lord's. Though we may not be aware of it, we are often at odds with our wise and loving Lord. The change he is working on is not the change we dream about. We dream about change in it—a person or circumstance—but God is working in the midst of it to change us.

Even if he never does this, I am called to maintain an attitude of forgiveness toward the offender.

He had the theological dexterity of a gymnast, but he lived like a relational paraplegic.