Surrender to Love Quotes

“Growth in love is not an accomplishment but the receipt of a gift.”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

“Love reconnects us to life. The truth of Christ's life is that life is love and love is life. There is no genuine life without love. Self-interest suffocates life. Life implodes when self-interest is at the core. This is why the kingdom of self is based on death. Ultimately, taking care of Number One takes care of no one. For the only way to truly care for myself is to give myself in love of others. There I will find my truest and deepest fulfillment.”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

“Meditating on God's love has done more to increase my love than decades of effort to try to be more loving. Allowing myself to deeply experience his love - taking time to soak in it an allow it to infuse me - has begun to effect changes that I had given up hope of ever experiencing. Coming back to God in my failures at love, throwing myself into his arms and asking him to remind me of how much he loves me as I am - here I begin to experience new levels of love to give to others.”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

“The single most important thing I have learned in over thirty years of study of how love produces healing is that love is transformational only when it is received in vulnerability.”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

“The deepest ache of the soul is the spiritual longing for connection and belonging. No one was created for isolation. “Nothing in creation is ever totally at home in itself,” says John O’Donohue. “No thing is ultimately at one with itself.”2”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

“In his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela says that as a young man he came to understand that his freedom was inseparably tied up with that of his South African people. He found himself unable to enjoy the limited freedom he was allowed as an attorney with the privileges of education when he knew his people were not free. “Freedom is indivisible,” he argues; “the chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me.”5”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

“There is nothing more important in life than learning to love and be loved. Jesus elevated love as the goal of spiritual transformation. Psychoanalysts consider it the capstone of psychological growth. Giving and receiving love is at the heart of being human. It is our raison d’être.”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

“despite the unpopularity of the notion, surrender plays a crucial role in the spiritual journey as understood by most major religions and spiritual traditions. Far from being a sign of weakness, only surrender to something or someone bigger than us is sufficiently strong to free us from the prison of our egocentricity. Only surrender is powerful enough to overcome our isolation and alienation.”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

“Paradoxically, no one can change until they first accept themselves as they are. Self-deceptions and an absence of real vulnerability block any meaningful transformation. It is only when I accept who I am that I dare to show you that self in all its vulnerability and nakedness. Only then do I have the opportunity to receive your love in a manner that makes a genuine difference.”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

“The English word surrender carries the implication of putting one’s full weight on someone or something. It involves letting go—a release of effort, tension and fear. And it involves trust. One cannot let go of self-dependence and transfer dependence to someone else without trust. Floating is a good illustration of this, because you cannot float until you let go.”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

“Looking back, I find it remarkable how easily I accepted ideas about God as substitutes for direct experience of him. It took me a long time to begin to know God through my heart and not simply my head.”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

“The presence of anger does not mean the absence of love—particularly in God. Love is God’s character, not simply an emotion. What a small god we would have if divine character was dependent on our behavior. The Christian God is not like this. The Christian God is slow to anger and rich in mercy (see Exodus 34:6, echoed in Joel 2:13 and many other places in Scripture).”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

“Christian obedience should always be based on surrender to a person, not simply acceptance of an obligation. It is surrender to love, not submission to a duty.”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

“if love connects us to life, it offers us a life that we can no longer control. No longer can I choose whom I will love and whom I will ignore.”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

“Love always involves not just saying yes to someone but also saying no to self. The life of love is a life of death to the kingdom of self.”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

“The relative constancy of the love of family and friends makes the absolute faithfulness of divine love at least conceivable. Hints of unconditional love from humans make the possibility of absolutely unconditional divine love imaginable.”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

“I was intrigued. Young people like Amanda are not often best friends with their mothers. And yet the affection between them was clear. Sensing also, however, her mother’s disapproval of Amanda’s lifestyle, I asked what was the bond that had allowed her to remain close to her mother. Amanda replied, “For as long as I can remember, every night of my life I end the day by getting in bed with my mother and snuggling.” Amanda’s relationship with her mother is quite remarkable, and is in large part responsible for the fact that she has now left behind what she describes as her “black period” and is finding her way through adolescence in a relatively healthy manner. Amanda knew that she was deeply loved just exactly as she was. Her mother disapproved of her use of drugs, her promiscuous sex, her astoundingly profane language, her Satanic practices and most other aspects of her lifestyle. But with a wisdom that I have rarely seen in parents, she recognized that what her daughter needed was not lectures but love. Fortunately, she had been giving this in large doses for all of Amanda’s life. Equally fortunately, she did not now allow her disapproval of her daughter’s behavior to interrupt this pattern in the slightest. Amanda’s mother offered a truly transforming love—transforming because while it could be resisted, it could not be received without profound psychospiritual impact.”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

“Our failures to live up to even our own expectations and ideals are massive. Our failures to live up to God’s expectations are profound. Jesus knew this. This is why his call to leave everything, follow him and experience true life is so striking. It puts us in touch with the reality of our inner world, and it makes us aware of the depth of our longing for real change.”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

“Far from being incompatible with obedience, surrender provides the motive for obedience. We should obey God because he has won our hearts in love. If he has not, our focus should not be so much on obedience as on knowing his love. For once we get that solidly in place, obedience begins to take care of itself.”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

“Surrender to anything other than love would be idiocy. Alarm bells should go off when we hear of people surrendering to abusive relationships. Surrender involves too much vulnerability to be a responsible action in relation to anything other than unconditional love. Ultimately, of course, this means that absolute surrender can only be offered to Perfect Love. Only God deserves absolute surrender, because only God can offer absolutely dependable love.”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

“Life lived with resolve and determination is life lived apart from surrender.”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

“The surrender Jesus invites from us—choosing his will and his life over our own—can never be motivated by anything but love. But we can and frequently do offer a substitute for surrender—something that looks superficially enough like it that we easily confuse it with surrender. We can offer obedience.”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

“Those who surrender obey. But not all who obey surrender. It is quite easy to obey God for the wrong reasons. What God desires is submission of our heart and will, not simply compliance in our behavior.”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

“It is surrender to love that I really resist. I am willing to accept measured doses of love as long as it doesn’t upset the basic framework of my world. That framework is built on the assumption that people get what they deserve. That’s what I really want.”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

“Grace is totally alien to human psychology. We want to get our house in order and then let God love and accept us. The psychology of works-righteousness and self-certification is foundational to the human psyche and totally at odds with grace.”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

“Only the Lord God unconditionally cherishes human beings. Only the Lord God forgives all our offenses and teaches us how to forgive ourselves. Only the Lord God provides everything he demands. Only the Lord God offers the life of his own Son for the salvation of his people.”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

“The God Christians worship loves sinners, redeems failures, delights in second chances and fresh starts, and never tires of pursuing lost sheep, waiting for prodigal children, or rescuing those damaged by life and left on the sides of its paths.”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

“After several years of hellfire sermons, I did what any reasonable ten-year-old child would do under the circumstances—I accepted Christ into my heart and began seeking to live a life that would please God.”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

“The Father’s love reflects the Father’s character, not the children’s behavior. My behavior—whether responsible or irresponsible—is beside the point. Responsible behavior does not increase the Father’s love, nor does irresponsible behavior decrease it.”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

“Often they become uncomfortable with an emphasis on divine love; they feel an urgent need to balance this by highlighting God’s hatred of sin. Unfortunately, while they may give intellectual assent to God’s love, they often experience very little of it.”
― David G. Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality