Speaking Truth In Love Quotes

“We don’t just need a perspective or a strategy. We need a Savior, right here, right now.”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community

“learn to love others intelligently rather than demand their affirmation and adoration.”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community

“By instinct, habit, and enculturation, all of us tend to think of counseling as a human-with-human interaction. But in fact a human-with-Savior interaction must come first. When I as a counselor don’t get that straight, I inevitably offer others some sort of saviorette.”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community

“For spiritual vitality, the church of Jesus Christ must submit to God’s definition of both counsel (the content) and counseling (the activity).”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community

“These two simple questions—What are you facing? How does the Lord connect?—express the core agenda of our discipleship. They set up the call to explicit faith and explicit love.”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community

“When you counsel, you are representing, incarnating, and bringing a living Redeemer to people who need him.”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community

“First, for many people the Bible functions within a narrow scope. It gives a religious formula to “get people saved” and then tells them what to do morally: doctrine, conversion experience, and moral values. From that perspective, all a biblical counselor might say to people is, “Here’s how to accept Christ so that you’ll go to heaven. Now, until that day, here are the rules.” But such moralizing and spiritualizing flies against the Bible’s real call. God never tacks willpower and self-effort onto grace. His words are about all of life, not some religious sector.”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community

“Drugs cannot heal our allergy to self-knowledge.”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community

“God’s gaze, intentions and actions heal more deeply.”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community

“In another word, we sin. We don’t want to know this. It’s easier to admit sexual perversity, death wish, power drives, egotism, neediness, or class-consciousness than to admit sinfulness in the sight of God. Bad as they are, those other things are not the devastating blow that unglues us. This does. You must approach counseling ministry with a keen awareness of this core choice in every human heart. The people who talk in any “counseling” conversation come with many different personal agendas.”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community

“To enter into yourself is the brutally wonderful, painstakingly delightful way. It sometimes feels like death, but always comes up life. The alternatives sometimes feel like life but always come up death.”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community

“The Christian life is a lifelong “race of repentance,” but we want to have arrived already.10”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community

“Does Psalm 119 have anything to say about these parking places for the heart? It changes every one.”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community

“In God’s judgment, compassion for helpless people demonstrates the goodness of his character.”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community

“In other words, Psalm 119 is personal prayer. It’s talking to, not teaching about. We hear what a man says out loud in God’s presence: his joyous pleasure, vocal need, open adoration, blunt requests, candid assertions, deep struggles, fiercely good intentions. The various words for the Word appear once in each verse, but I-you words appear about four times per verse. That’s a 4:1 ratio and emphasis.”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community

“I, me, my, mine, and you, your, yours.3 Psalm 119 is the most extensive I-to-you conversation in the Bible.”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community

“repeated in Psalm 119?” The answer that usually comes to mind?”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community

“It’s about the Word of God.”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community

“The seemingly relentless read-your-Bible-memorize-Scripture emphasis can come across as moralistic. Your relationship with the Lord seems to hinge on the dutiful performance of “quiet time,” but somehow you never get it right.”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community

“Psalm 119 intends to work in you. It is about life’s painful realities, the gifts of God, and how those two meet to find life’s highest delight.”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community

“How Do You Help a ‘Psychologized’ Counselee?” considers a woman who needs to radically reframe the way she understands herself, her sufferings, her motives, and her God.”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community

“Chapter 8 takes up the problem of how to talk with people who talk-talk-talk-talk-talk.”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community

“Listen well to people, and you will find stories and metaphors that will help you to speak well into their lives.”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community

“Wise counseling must be biblical counseling. Counseling that offers no word from God will parch, starve, mislead, and ultimately kill the very people it tries hard to help. But how does counseling present and work with Scripture?”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community

“Wise counseling helps people face themselves honestly. It helps them look in the only true mirror: What does God see in me?”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community

“If my counseling does not help others rely upon Another (upon whom I also rely), I will inevitably teach them to rely on themselves—or on me, or other friends, or medications, or techniques, or pablum “truths” (that are in fact empty or even fictional). This cornerstone chapter explores Psalm 119: “If your law had not been my delight, then I would have perished in my affliction” (v. 92).”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community

“By instinct, habit, and enculturation, all of us tend to think of counseling as a human-with-human interaction. But in fact a human-with-Savior interaction must come first.”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community

“Part I of this book focuses on the counseling conversation between two (or more) people.”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community

“But you are destroying yourself with what you believe and how you are living.” Those were precisely the words that changed my life. The cruise missile of wise love blew apart the bunker of self-will in which I lived. My friend’s words were not a product of technique. They were artless. But they had four things going for them. They were true, loving, personal, and appropriate.”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community

“I love and respect you as a person, and I want what is good for you.”
― David A. Powlison, Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community