Quotes About Growth

Your Lord pries open your hands and takes away your crutches and distractions. He exposes your weaknesses so that you will cry out for what he knows you need, but what you have been willing to live without.

Finally, we must understand that theology is never an end in itself, but a means to an end, the end that we would progressively become like the One who is the ultimate definition of what love is and what love does.

the character of a life isn't set in three or four big moments of life, but in ten thousand little, virtually unnoticed moments.

We must all come to understand and accept the truth that our walks with God are community projects.

The normal day is a 24-hour collection of little moments. Day after day, week after week, and year after year, these little moments set the character of a person's life.

Successful parenting is the rightful, God-ordained loss of control. The goal of parenting is to work ourselves out of a job. The goal of parenting is to raise children who were once totally dependent on us to be independent, mature people who, with reliance on God and proper connectedness to the Christian community, are able to stand on their own two feet.

Often failure is the workroom God uses in our lives to reform us to be what we need to be in order to be more successful tools in his hands.

necesitamos entender que la teología nunca es un fin en sí misma, sino que es un medio para alcanzar un fin: ser cada vez más como Aquel que es la definición por excelencia del amor.

Everything we say and do, everything we commit ourselves to, and every situation, location, and relationship we experience is experienced between the already and the not yet. You will never understand the things you face every day until you understand that you live in the middle. Everything in your life is shaped by what the middle is like.

What is God doing in the here and now? He is employing the difficulties of life as tools of grace to produce character in you that would not grow any other way.

You can't buy wisdom. You can't get it by hard work or lots of experience. No, wisdom is the result of rescue and relationship.

None of us is yet a grace graduate, but we're satisfied. We all give evidence that we still need to grow, but we're satisfied.

This means that my biggest, ongoing problem as a dad is not my children, it's me.

The biblical model of waiting is not simply about what you will get at the end of your wait, but about who you will become as you wait.

We all fail somehow, someway every day. Often failure is the workroom God uses in our lives to reform us to be what we need to be in order to be more successful tools in his hands.

Humility is the soil in which mercy for others grows. Gratitude for mercy given is what motivates mercy extended.

struggles are part of God's plan for you.

Parenting is about the condition that makes good behavior seem such a hard and elusive goal.

You and I need to say it to ourselves again and again. We need to look in the mirror and make the confession as part of our morning routine. Here's what we all need to say: "I am not a grace graduate.

Inspection means that we invite people to step over the normal boundaries of leadership relationships to look into our lives to help us see things that we would not see on our own. It means inviting fellow leaders to watch for our souls.

No, I don't like the travail of pain or loss anymore than you do, but in my suffering, a miraculous thing happened: Mr. Hardship became a tool of my Savior to produce very good things in me, things that I am sure could not have been produced any other way.

God is working right now, but not so much to give us predictable, comfortable, and pleasurable lives. He isn't so much working to transform our circumstances as he is working through hard circumstances to transform you and me.

Humility is the soil in which mercy for others grows.

Rather than suffering being connected to the bad things we have done, Scripture connects trials and difficulty to the good things God wants for us and is working to produce in us (see James 1:2–4).