Understanding People Quotes

“The route to maturity is long, bumpy, and uphill. But it can be traveled - and it's worth it. At times the route to life will seem like the route to death. Entering more deeply into our unmet longings and exposing more thoroughly our sinful self-protection is painful. But the awareness of pain enables richer and more courageous trust, and the awareness of sin can lead to more profound levels of repentance and obedience. There is a route to life. Our Lord is that way. He is the truth that frees us to walk toward him. He is the life that we can taste now and indulge in freely and fully for all eternity.”
― Larry Crabb, Understanding People

“Knowing God is shattering, transforming, crippling, renewing, devastating, strengthening - but knowing God is life. Apart from God, life must be distorted to be endured. With God, life can be faced in all its ugliness and potential - and we can become 'more than conquerors,' a people whose fellowship with Christ enables us to love him and others as we were designed to do.”
― Larry Crabb, Understanding People

“Godly character can be defined as confidence in God that one day things will be as they should be. In this present life we groan - something is wrong with everything. But in the life to come, we will feast - nothing will be wrong with anything. Both perseverance and joy emerge from that confidence.”
― Larry Crabb, Understanding People

“Something is different about people who love. They convey a presence that goes beyond the words they say, the things they do. We know they are for us. In their presence, our growth seems more appealing to us than required of us. Because the relationship is never at stake, we sense a freedom to enter fully into the enjoyment of relationship rather than to keep the relationship intact.”
― Larry Crabb, Understanding People

“Living in a fallen world means to live as a damaged person. It is the commitment to avoid further damage that interferes with our efforts to love. For most of us, love is not the bottom line; self-protection is. But in trying to find our lives through maneuvering our worlds to keep us safe, we lose our ability to relate in ways that would bring us the deep joy of living as we were designed to live. The saying that our Lord repeated more than any other invited people to lose their life to find it. Yet we foolishly work to save our lives and thus corrupt our love.”
― Larry Crabb, Understanding People

“Compliments, warm smiles, and affectionate pats never define love. So much of what passes for Christian community represents the well-developed art of graciously distancing one another for purposes of personal comfort.”
― Larry Crabb, Understanding People

“In a word, the visible evidence of maturity is love. The more I reflect on the love Paul spoke of in 1 Corinthians 13, the more I am persuaded that few people love. People who love, I suggest, are not always those who look the most loving. Nice people are not hard to find. Churches, neighborhood parties, and civic clubs are full of friendly people. Gracious people who would never make you the object of unkind jest are known to all of us. Good people, responsible people, kind people, moral people, generous people do exist in tolerable numbers among the other sort. But loving people are in short supply.”
― Larry Crabb, Understanding People

“Image-bearers can handle their longings in only one of two ways: Either we can turn to God and cling with stubborn intensity to Him when life threatens to rip out our very souls or we can deny the depth and meaning of our pain and keep on working to feel better without sacrificing our independence. None of us perfectly elects the first choice and most don't even consider it.”
― Larry Crabb, Understanding People

“The longer we continue walking the path of independence, the more deeply we sink into the mud of our corrupted thinking. Hints of emptiness sometimes sneak through and invade our awareness, but we quickly dismiss them as evidence of immaturity, neurosis, or insufficient achievements. Occasional floods of despair are flushed down the drains of therapy, pills, zeal for a new cause, drugs, new forms of pleasure, spending sprees, personal retreat and meditation, or suicide. Our foolishness remains intact; we still look for life without coming to God on his terms.”
― Larry Crabb, Understanding People

“A renewed mind does not mean a mind pumped up with exhilarating clichés about the joys of living or our potential to turn tragedy into triumph. Real change means change in the inner man, where a deceitful heart, full of motives hidden even to ourselves, and a darkened mind, holding ideas that we may consciously disown, must be exposed and confronted by the message of God.”
― Larry Crabb, Understanding People

“Sin originated in the darkening of the human mind and heart as man turned from the truth about God to embrace a lie about him and consequently a whole universe of lies about his creation. Sinful thoughts, words, and deeds flow forth from this darkened heart automatically and compulsively, as water from a polluted fountain.”
― Larry Crabb, Understanding People

“[W]e must remember that the essence of holiness is other-centeredness, a worshipful love for God and a love for others that motivates sacrificial care for them. Godly self-examination has an outward and forward look. Although it may take us through periods of internal pain and self-loathing as previously denied realities are exposed, there must be the clear commitment to use whatever is discovered to become more like the Lord, to deal aggressively with whatever is wrong.”
― Larry Crabb, Understanding People

“The Christian message especially is one that must take root in the very core of our being before we can proclaim it with power to others. Skill and knowledge without maturity in the things of Christ do not qualify someone to be an effective communicator of Christian truth.”
― Larry Crabb, Understanding People

“The Scriptures will never come alive until we bring all of who we are to its truth.”
― Larry Crabb, Understanding People

“Only the "words" of God can be understood in a seminary library or a scholar's study. To grasp the "message" of God we must take our understanding of the text and move deeply into the lives of ourselves and others, admitting confusion, praying for wisdom, sticking rigidly with only the essentials of our faith, and thinking openly about everything else.”
― Larry Crabb, Understanding People

“[O]n closer inspection it will be seen that our questions often grow out of a demand that life work as we want it to along with a quiet unwillingness to look deeply and honestly at some ugly problems and internal pain hidden deeply within us.”
― Larry Crabb, Understanding People

“[O]n closer inspection it will be seen that our questions of ten grow out of a demand that life work as we want it to along with a quiet unwillingness to look deeply and honestly at some ugly problems and internal pain hidden deeply within us.”
― Larry Crabb, Understanding People

“The fact is that our fall into sin has so warped our view of life that the questions for which we urgently seek answers may not be so important after all; or if they are good ones, they will usually be spoiled to at least some degree by our lack of wisdom.”
― Larry Crabb, Understanding People

“Something is wrong when the message from a loving God to the people He created becomes more an academic treatise to be studied rather than wonderful truth to be grasped and breathed.”
― Larry Crabb, Understanding People

“[T]he purpose of the Bible, its plainness, its purity, and the promise of the Spirit's help when we study it, combine to justify more confidence in the potentially errant conclusions reached through studying Scripture than in the potentially errant conclusions of scientific research.”
― Larry Crabb, Understanding People

“A picture may be worth a thousand words, but when precision of meaning is what you're after, sentences do a better job.”
― Larry Crabb, Understanding People

“معرفة الله محطمة .. مغيرة .. معجزة .. مجددة .. محيرة .. مقوية .. لكن معرفة الله هي الحياة وبدون الله تشوه الحياة لدرجة تصبح معها غير محتملة. اما مع الله فانه "يعظم انتصارنا". نصبح اناسا تمكنهم شركتهم مع المسيح من محبته ومحبة الاخرين; الامر الذي جبلنا من اجله.”
― Larry Crabb, Understanding People

“معرفة الله محطمة .. مغيرة .. معجزة .. مجددة .. محيرة .. مقوية .. لكن معرفة الله هي الحياة وبدون الله تشوه الحياة لدرجة تصبح معها غير محتملة. اما مع الله فانخ "يعظم انتصارنا". نصبح اناسا تمكنهم شركتهم مع المسيح من محبته ومحبة الاخرين; الامر الذي جبلنا من اجله.”
― Larry Crabb, Understanding People

“حين نلجأ لاي شخص غير الله ليشبع اشتياقنا العميق الي العلافة, لن نجني سوي خيبة الامل ... فحتي افضل الذين في العالم ... لا يمكنهم ان يعطوني ما اتلهف اليه , محبة نقية وشديدة لا تشوبها شائبة”
― Larry Crabb, Understanding People