The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus Quotes

“Christianity is not an ethical code. It is a love affair, a Spirit-filled way of living aimed at making us professional lovers of God and people.”
― Brennan Manning, The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus

“Our response to Jesus Christ will be total the day we experience how total is his love for us. Instead of our self-conscious efforts to be good, we should allow ourselves the luxury of letting ourselves be loved by God. And much of his love for us will be expressed through the medium of our friends’ love for us. How else could he reveal it in a way that is tangible? “You are my friends if you do what I command. . . . This is my command: Love each other” (John 15:14, 17).”
― Brennan Manning, The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus

“The most important thing that ever happens in prayer is letting ourselves be loved by God. “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10).”
― Brennan Manning, The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus

“Before I am asked to show compassion toward my brothers and sisters in their suffering, He asks me to accept His compassion in my own life, to be transformed by it, to become caring and compassionate toward myself in my own suffering and sinfulness, in my own hurt, failure and need. The degree of our compassion for others depends upon our capacity for self-acceptance.”
― Brennan Manning, The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus

“God's love is based on nothing, and the fact that it is based on nothing makes us secure. Were it based on anything we do, and that 'anything' were to collapse, then God's love would crumble as well. But with the God of Jesus no such thing can possibly happen. People who realize this can live freely and to the full.”
― Brennan Manning, The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus

“There is an intimate bond between the sufferings of Christ and the conflict and suffering in each Christian life. The daily dying of the Christian is a prolongation of Christ’s own death. Paul writes in Romans 6:3, “Don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” Baptism is not merely a momentary dying; it inaugurates a lifelong state of death to the world, to the flesh and to sin. Our daily death to selfishness, dishonesty and degraded love is our personal participation in the fellowship of His sufferings.”
― Brennan Manning, The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus

“I am convinced that without a gutlevel experience of our profound spiritual emptiness, it is not possible to encounter the living God.”
― Brennan Manning, The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus

“Becoming a little child meant becoming aware that all is gift, that I am helpless and powerless to add a single inch to my spiritual stature. Without the subjective awareness of utter dependence, the personal consciousness of a dynamism outside of self at work in us, I seriously question whether anyone has made real progress in the spiritual life.”
― Brennan Manning, The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus

“But in the one blinding moment of salvific truth, it was real knowledge calling for personal engagement of my mind and heart. Christianity was no longer simply a moral code but a love affair, the thrill, the excitement, the incredible, passionate joy of being loved and falling in love with Jesus Christ.”
― Brennan Manning, The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus

“One spiritual writer has observed that human beings are born with two diseases: life, from which we die; and hope, which says the first disease is not terminal. Hope is built into the structure of our personalities, into the depths of our unconscious; it plagues us to the very moment of our death. The critical question is whether hope is self-deception, the ultimate cruelty of a cruel and tricky universe, or whether it is just possibly the imprint of reality.”
― Brennan Manning, The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus

“All our actions—eating, drinking, sleeping, working—are thus potentially Christ’s actions. But this potential must be actualized. Instead of a mindless drifting through the insignificant, apparently superficial and nonreligious events of the day, our passive union with Christ can be made active by creative acts of the will, intelligence and imagination.”
― Brennan Manning, The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus

“For Paul, a new creation meant a total renovation of the inner self, a change of mind and heart. It meant far more than the passive union achieved in water baptism. To be “in Christ,” he told the Philippians, means to have in you the mind of Christ Jesus, to think as Christ thought, to have the ideals Christ had, to throb with the desires that filled Christ’s heart, to replace all your natural actions to persons, events and circumstances with the response of Jesus Christ. In a word, a christocentric life means to live in the heart of Jesus, to share His tastes and aversions, to have the same interests, affections and attitudes, to be motivated in everything by His loving compassion. It means making the habitual thought patterns of Jesus Christ so completely your own that truly “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.”
― Brennan Manning, The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus

“The only cure for suffering is to face it head on, grasp it round the neck and use it.”
― Brennan Manning, The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus

“Everybody has a vocation to some form of life work. But behind that and deeper than that, everybody has a vocation to be a person, to be fully and deeply a human being, to be Christlike. And the second thing is more important than the first. It is more important to be a great person than a great teacher, butcher or candlestick maker. And if the only chance of succeeding in the second is to fail in the first, the failure, from God’s point of view, is fruitful.”
― Brennan Manning, The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus

“The parables of Jesus reveal a God who is consistently overgenerous with His forgiveness and grace. He portrays God as the lender magnanimously canceling a debt, as the shepherd seeking a strayed sheep, as the judge hearing the prayer of the tax collector. In Jesus’ stories, divine forgiveness does not depend on our repentance or on our ability to love our enemies or on our doing heroic, virtuous deeds. God’s forgiveness depends only on the love out of which He fashioned the human race.”
― Brennan Manning, The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus

“It is through such failure and weeping that the Abba of Jesus conforms us to the image of His Son. Yet if our faith is not alive and dynamically operative, suffering is absurd, pointless.”
― Brennan Manning, The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus

“In days long ago when there were no spiritual directors or brilliant commentaries on Scripture, fidelity to God’s will was the whole of spirituality.”
― Brennan Manning, The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus

“Abandonment is the triumph of trust in our lives.”
― Brennan Manning, The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus

“And that’s the way the Father of Jesus is: He loves those most who need Him most, who rely on Him, depend upon Him and trust Him in everything. Little He cares whether you’ve been as pure as St. John or as sinful as the prostitute in Simon the Pharisee’s house. All that matters is trust. It seems to me that learning how to trust God defines the meaning of Christian living. God doesn’t wait until we have our moral life in order before He starts loving us.”
― Brennan Manning, The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus

“That is why God is a scandal to men and women—because He cannot be comprehended by a finite mind.”
― Brennan Manning, The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus

“of tears. Above the din of his convulsive crying, I spoke to this man of the compassion of Jesus, of the Father’s unbearable forgiveness, infinite patience and tender love, of the finding of the lost sheep, the joy in heaven over the return of one sinner. As I spoke, the most amazing thing happened. The flow of tears stopped; the man’s face became transfigured. His mouth was wide open in wonder, his eyes transfixed in rapture. The Word of God pierced his heart; the truth set him free. He was an awestruck witness to reckless confidence without limit in God’s mercy. Some people play with Gospel imagery, mesmerize you with word games. They believe what they are saying and persuade others to belief. But the ideas stay lodged in their intellect and the words stay caught in their throats. Beautiful head trips are all they are. They never internalize mercy. They never risk, they never leap in trust, they never surrender to reckless confidence. The worst sin in their lives is that they exempt themselves from grace.”
― Brennan Manning, The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus

“I start a seven-day silent retreat tomorrow,” he replied. “I’m not leading it, I’m taking it.” “Brennan, help me here. I know you’re into that sort of thing. How are you different after getting away for a week with just you and the Lord?” Without conscious intent (I think), Brennan gently cut through my American pragmatism when he answered, “I don’t know what it does for me. I’ve”
― Brennan Manning, The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus