Beloved Dust Quotes

“God has gifted himself to his creation by sending his Son and Spirit. This space is received in salvation and endowed as a gift by God. This space makes life with God possible. God does not offer forgiveness from a distance, nor does he want to set up a moral obstacle course for you to run so that he might accept you. God offers himself because he wants to live life with you. The Christian life is being with the God who is always with you, and therefore it entails a full reception of who you are.”
― Jamin Goggin, Beloved Dust: Drawing Close to God by Discovering the Truth About Yourself

“First, “the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground.” We are dust—earthy and humble, finite and temporal. Second, he “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” We live on borrowed breath. We are alive in the most profound sense of the word—filled with the very breath that spoke creation into being. Within this tension is a status that is regal but lowly, significant but insignificant, unique but ordinary.3 God looks upon humanity’s frame of dust and says, “I formed you, I love you, and I delight in you.” We are beloved dust.”
― Jamin Goggin, Beloved Dust: Drawing Close to God by Discovering the Truth About Yourself

“God is relentlessly personal. In giving himself, God requires that we give ourselves. In giving himself, God opens the door for us to come clean about who we are. God wants more than pretending. Therefore, we are called to vulnerability before him, to be open to him in everything. Openness is always relational. It is an awareness that everything in life is done in the presence of God. We live in the presence of a God who took on our nature in Jesus Christ and broke open his own life for us in the sending of his Spirit.”
― Jamin Goggin, Beloved Dust: Drawing Close to God by Discovering the Truth About Yourself

“The only way to enter into the deep questions of life with God is to do so prayerfully. Therefore the only way to read this book well is to read it prayerfully. You might be frustrated with prayer right now. You might find prayer lonely, foreign, and painful. You might even subconsciously avoid God in prayer. Nonetheless, pray. Ask God to unveil your heart in prayer. Ask him to teach you about yourself so that you can receive his grace more fully. Ask him to enlighten your heart to his life, work, and power. We encourage you to read this book as we wrote it—within the prayer of the psalmist: “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!” (Ps. 139:23–24).”
― Jamin Goggin, Beloved Dust: Drawing Close to God by Discovering the Truth About Yourself

“Therefore, as we come in prayer, we come as those already justified before God. Even our prayers have been justified.”
― Jamin Goggin, Beloved Dust: Drawing Close to God by Discovering the Truth About Yourself

“We are beautiful because we are cherished by God. We are valuable because we are his. We come to embrace these realities in the Christian life by being with God. We come to know our value as beloved dust in prayer.”
― Jamin Goggin, Beloved Dust: Drawing Close to God by Discovering the Truth About Yourself

“Prayer is not the place to be good, but the place to be honest.”3”
― Jamin Goggin, Beloved Dust: Drawing Close to God by Discovering the Truth About Yourself

“Prayer is a place to receive. Prayer is a place to be known. Prayer is not a place to escape reality, but is a place to rest with God in reality. In”
― Jamin Goggin, Beloved Dust: Drawing Close to God by Discovering the Truth About Yourself

“Our calling is not to make the life we want; our calling is to embrace the life God has for us. We often assume the latter must be the former, but it rarely is. When”
― Jamin Goggin, Beloved Dust: Drawing Close to God by Discovering the Truth About Yourself

“Humanity exchanged being with God for talking about him, as if he was not actually present. We were not created to talk about God, but to be with him. From the moment of our creation, we were intended to live and move and have our being in him (Acts 17:28). The”
― Jamin Goggin, Beloved Dust: Drawing Close to God by Discovering the Truth About Yourself

“Perhaps nothing is as subtle and deceptive as the ease with which our forms of worshipping God (reading the Bible, singing, partaking in the Lord’s Supper, serving the poor, etc.) can be used for our own self-worship. This is so subtle and deceptive that we don’t even know it is there. We can become aware of this self-worship when we pay attention to our desires. Our desires hint at subconscious beliefs we hold about life, God, and ourselves. These beliefs often surface when we enter God’s presence. In His presence we come to realize how often we relate to him as a tool or resource in our quest for happiness, fulfillment, and meaning, rather than as the Lord who calls us to worship.”
― Jamin Goggin, Beloved Dust: Drawing Close to God by Discovering the Truth About Yourself

“With all our timidity, sin, fear, anxiety, and brokenness, we approach the throne of grace boldly because we approach it as those in Christ. We do not pave the way there through our accomplishments—we approach the throne by the blood of Christ. This is not something we simply affirm; this must shape the posture of our hearts in prayer. We come before God humbly, boasting in Christ alone.”
― Jamin Goggin, Beloved Dust: Drawing Close to God by Discovering the Truth About Yourself

“How we handle our disappointment with God reveals the heart of our idolatry. But that is the very point! The dryness God ushers in to our lives is for the very purpose of bringing these idolatries to the surface. This is why dryness is not a problem to be fixed. This is not a season to work through. This is the high calling of God to be present with him wherever he leads, and to utilize this season to be with him who is always with us, even when we feel like he has abandoned us.”
― Jamin Goggin, Beloved Dust: Drawing Close to God by Discovering the Truth About Yourself

“As followers of the crucified Lord, we must accept the fact that emptiness or a felt absence of God is going to be part of our journey.”
― Jamin Goggin, Beloved Dust: Drawing Close to God by Discovering the Truth About Yourself

“Healing comes only by walking with God through our brokenness, never by avoiding it and pretending it isn’t there.”
― Jamin Goggin, Beloved Dust: Drawing Close to God by Discovering the Truth About Yourself

“Our calling is not to make the life we want; our calling is to embrace the life God has for us.”
― Jamin Goggin, Beloved Dust: Drawing Close to God by Discovering the Truth About Yourself

“The tragedy of the story is not a son leaving home and returning as a servant—the real tragedy is the son who stayed at home and somehow lost his identity anyway.”
― Jamin Goggin, Beloved Dust: Drawing Close to God by Discovering the Truth About Yourself

“Our great mistake is to see our brokenness, our finitude, and our sin as things that keep us from God rather than as opportunities to throw ourselves at the foot of the cross and grasp his grace.”
― Jamin Goggin, Beloved Dust: Drawing Close to God by Discovering the Truth About Yourself

“Only in the embrace that our lives are brief and fleeting do we grasp that our time, however limited, has been sanctified by God in Christ (James 4:14). Time is the space of grace, calling us to silence before him, humbly seeking after him, and waiting upon him and his timing.”
― Jamin Goggin, Beloved Dust: Drawing Close to God by Discovering the Truth About Yourself

“Prayerlessness is believing that you are more than dust and that time will bend to your will. Prayerlessness is always the fruit of idolatry. Prayerlessness is poor interpretation of reality, and it leads to a posture not fitting of who you are. This posture leads us to continually whitewash our lives while our hearts die within.”
― Jamin Goggin, Beloved Dust: Drawing Close to God by Discovering the Truth About Yourself

“Humanity exchanged being with God for talking about him, as if he was not actually present. We were not created to talk about God, but to be with him. From the moment of our creation, we were intended to live and move and have our being in him (Acts 17:28).”
― Jamin Goggin, Beloved Dust: Drawing Close to God by Discovering the Truth About Yourself

“The Christian life is being with God who is always with us.”
― Jamin Goggin, Beloved Dust: Drawing Close to God by Discovering the Truth About Yourself

“Sleep is an excellent litmus test of our posture toward time. Often, we view sleep as superfluous—wasted space that can be used if we determine more time is needed to accomplish a certain task. Every night millions of people around the world stare blankly at their TVs to avoid the reality that sleep is next on the day’s docket. Embracing our call to be creatures entails embracing sleep as a fundamental aspect of our vocation.”
― Jamin Goggin, Beloved Dust: Drawing Close to God by Discovering the Truth About Yourself

“Prayerlessness is poor interpretation of reality, and it leads to a posture not fitting of who you are.”
― Jamin Goggin, Beloved Dust: Drawing Close to God by Discovering the Truth About Yourself