Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Larry Crabb
Read between
May 1, 2017 - February 22, 2018
We all fall short of the glory of God, the relational glory of the God who is love.
First,
Second,
intimately relating to others so that
they feel heard, seen, valued, and accepted at their worst, with a vision for who they could become.
By Christian definition, loving is relating in a way that quite literally pours the life of Go...
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celebrate God’s grace not only when you succeed in loving well but also when you fail,
narrow road.
battle confronts an enemy.
live on the narrow road discover happiness—not
Our desire to experience God’s presence is satisfied most fully when we express God’s character most clearly by how we relate.
Prayer
happiness, that rare inner awareness of a quietly contented sense of well-being that we cannot help but long to experience.
First thing happiness,
develops when we struggle to love others with a costly love that is possible only if we have a life-giving relationship with Jesus that is grounded entirely in His love for
Group 1
Group 2
Too often, a blessed life leaves distorted love unrecognized and unchallenged.
Group 3
We learn to surrender lesser pleasures, the demand to experience second thing happiness, in order to make room for the first thing happiness that
emerges when we love like Jesus, when we relate to others in a way that delights God and enlivens our souls.
they evidence a stronger commitment to the well-being of others than to their own
“We know what real love is because Jesus gave up his life for us” (1 John 3:16).
Jesus’s happiness and joy came from giving Himself
God’s essential nature of outwardness, the glad passion to share with others the pleasure He knows,
“Anyone who claims to live in
God’s light and hates a brother or sister is still in the dark” (2:9 MSG).
Inwardness, a priority commitment to my own felt well-being
The joy of fellowship with the Trinity develops when we relate like the Trinity as Jesus
is formed in us by His Spirit
if the emotions aroused by any of the above sources do not lead us into the battle for a better love, the love revealed in the crucified Jesus, we have not yet tasted the deep happiness and the true joy of Jesus.
living loved, therefore lives to love.
“You’re far happier giving than getting” (Acts 20:35 MSG).
that kind of happiness—second thing happiness—can erode the desire to pay whatever price is required to know God so well that we discover first thing happiness,
our richest happiness depends not on loving like Jesus but on knowing we are loved
the more we rest in His inexplicable love,
the more God’s...
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will release us to show that gra...
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the happy God of suffering love is happy while He suffers
we need to profoundly redefine both what it means to be happy with the happiness that was always alive in Jesus and what it means to love others with undistorted love, the way Jesus loved.
“Why do you want to love them well?”
only wholehearted followers of Jesus who see how He sacrifices for those He loves are capable of wanting to love like Jesus.
spiritually maturing disciples are passionately, hopefully, and patiently obsessed with learning to love like Jesus;
we can actually learn to love like Him.
forgiveness;
live with God
our being spiritually formed
spiritual formation is relational formation
It is easier, and therefore more talked about, to practice spiritual disciplines in an effort to feel God’s presence than to practice them in order to draw on the Spirit’s power to love well.
I think I have suspected this for a while now. Though I have not use the same terminology I have wondered if we have thought wrongly about spiritual disciplines. Another words, what is the point if it still revolves around my experience of God? It's still about me and not God or others.
the Spirit of God is freeing us from our defensive, self-protective, and proud self-enhancing ways of relating and is forming us to love like Jesus. This, at the very least, means to live committed to the well-being of others at any cost to ourselves:
