You Are Not Your Own Quotes

“We are not free to pursue whatever brings us the most personal fulfillment. We are not free to define our identity in any way we wish. We are not free to use people or creation as tools for our own ends. We are limited”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“This is the fundamental lie of modernity: that we are our own.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“If everyone in America suddenly acknowledged that they are not their own but belong to God, we would still be left with systems, institutions, practices, and tools that are designed for the sovereign self, and it wouldn’t take long before we found ourselves right back where we started. We cannot evangelize our way out of this problem. We cannot volunteer our way out. We need a miracle. Our desire for a program of self-improvement, a personal method of accepting that you are not your own, is itself a symptom of the problem. We believe we can use technique to solve the problems of a society governed by technique—but as we’ve discovered, that does not work.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“Everyone is on their own private journey of self-discovery and self-expression, so that at times, modern life feels like billions of people in the same room shouting their own name so that everyone else knows they exist and who they are—which is a fairly accurate description of social media.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“Belonging to God sets limits on our lives. Sometimes they are hard limits to bear. It is not easy to stand before God, even with grace. Moment by moment we must set aside our sinful desires, even the ones closest to our heart, to live sacrificially. I do not want to lie to you. This is a difficult life.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“No matter how much we consciously affirm that our existence is already justified through God, virtually every other voice we interact with will tell us, “No. Keep striving. You haven’t done enough. If you quit now, your life will be a waste. Do something else to make it worthwhile.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“When other forms of law oppress us, we quite naturally retreat into autonomy, or self-law.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“Humans cannot live without meaning. We must interpret our world to navigate it. The only question is where that meaning comes from.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“Christ truly knows us and His acceptance unites us to Him, sanctifying us by teaching us moment by moment to love what is true and good and beautiful—to love His will.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“The faithful Christian life looks like thousands of little deaths to self every day.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“Instead of desiring and pursuing our own good, we are obligated to desire and pursue the good of others (Galatians 6:10; Philippians 2:3”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“You cannot desire the good of your non-Christian neighbor too much. It is not possible. However much you desire for your non-Christian neighbors to receive justice and know God’s love and mercy and to be treated rightly as human persons made in God’s image, you could always desire their good more. In contemporary America, our temptation is to care too little, not too much. Our tendency is to think of ourselves as totally independent of our street, neighborhood, and city. But we have an obligation to them.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“If abortions increase and racial justice remains elusive and wars develop in new and even more dehumanizing forms, we don’t get to stop doing good. We have received orders from God to “do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8).”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“Our egotistical temptation is to think that what matters in life is what is big and visible and political. So we make grand plans and join national movements in hopes that we can make a “real” difference. And no doubt, some political movements can make a real difference. But for the most part the answer to the city is found in millions of tiny decisions to live faithfully even while living in the city.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“While belonging to the church, you will be hurt. You will have to learn to love people who look different from you, who have different interests, passions, and languages. You’ll have to give sacrificially to support people who in a strict meritocracy don’t “deserve” your compassion or aid. You’ll have to submit to the right leadership of elders. You’ll have to get over yourself and get out of your head. Maybe hardest of all, you’ll have to do all this while rejecting the lie that it is your love and service that makes you righteous or important or justified. You are righteous because Christ is righteous. You love and serve because He loved and served you.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“Almost everyone else you meet will continue to believe that they are their own and so are you. Almost every institution will treat you like an autonomous individual, subject to instrumentalization and valued according to efficiency.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“If I had to guess, I’d say that Americans in the evangelical church are not much better at accepting their lives as a gift from God than their secular neighbors. I witness much of the same ambition, the same fight for validation, the same fear of inadequacy driving people in the church and outside the church—in my own heart.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“Instrumentalizing human persons is one of the defining features of our contemporary anthropology. When we are all our own, we have no obligation to think of each other as anything more than tools for our personal gain. But in the counter anthropology I am recommending—the idea that we are not our own—we seem to find the same instrumentalization at work. Perhaps the counter anthropology is inhuman too? Not quite. Rather we should say that all abusive forms of authority treat people as less-than-fully-human and do not desire their good.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“When you choose to follow God’s laws out of personal preference, you will eventually discover a breaking point where your desire for experiences or self-expression comes up hard against an ethical law. And at that moment, you can choose to abandon Christianity as an inadequate or antiquated lifestyle, find a more inclusive style of Christianity, or you can accept that Christianity was never meant to be a lifestyle and with the aid of the Holy Spirit deny your desire. Only if you truly belong to someone else does the latter option make any sense. If you belong to yourself, then it is foolish and perhaps even abusive to deny yourself. But if “you are not your own,” it matters what you do with your body.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“But so long as our foundational understanding of what it means to be a human goes unquestioned, so long as we blame our problems on natural or biological limitations, societal injustices, or personal weaknesses, our only recourse will be more techniques. Thank God we are not our own.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“The reports about these contracted moderation companies are grim. In one investigation, The Verge found that employees at a Facebook moderation office in Phoenix, Arizona, were developing drug habits to cope.22 They turned to dark humor. They suffered panic attacks. They had sex with each other as a form of “trauma bonding.” All the while, social media companies keep these employees at arm’s length by hiring them as contractors, not full-time employees. I have no doubt that social media companies will try new techniques to address these problems. At some point there will probably be artificial intelligence sophisticated enough to accurately moderate images and eliminate the need for constant human exposure to filth. But given the track record of techniques, I suspect such AI will also introduce new, unanticipated problems. In any event, the human capacity for imaginative evil will always be one step ahead of AI.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“For Dante in the fourteenth century, the question was not “Who am I?” but “Who is God?” and “How can I grow in Christlikeness?”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“The best example of this is Dante’s The Divine Comedy, which famously begins: “Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself / In dark woods, the right road lost.”17 One reason these lines have resonated with readers for centuries is that the poet is describing a common human experience: waking up halfway into life only to discover you are lost. Perhaps you wake up one morning questioning whether your life is worth living.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“Like the rest of western society, the church in the West tends to be good at helping people cope with modern life, but not at undoing the disorder of modern life.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“As Kierkegaard understood, the deepest despair occurs when we are unconscious of being in despair. When we accept how deeply dysfunctional our world is, contentment isn’t really an option for us.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“To be your own and belong to yourself means that the most fundamental truth about existence is that you are responsible for your existence and everything it entails. I am responsible for living a life of purpose, of defining my identity, of interpreting meaningful events, of choosing my values, and electing where I belong. If I belong to myself, then I am the only one who can set limits on who I am or what I can do. No one else has the right to define me, to choose my journey in life, or to assure me that I am okay. I belong to myself. But the freedom of sovereign individualism comes at a great price. Once I am liberated from all social, moral, natural, and religious values, I become responsible for the meaning of my own life. With no God to judge or justify me, I have to be my own judge and redeemer. This burden manifests as a desperate need to justify our lives through identity crafting and expression.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“So obvious are the impotence and distress of all men in face of the social machine, which has become a machine for breaking hearts and crushing spirits, a machine for manufacturing irresponsibility, stupidity, corruption, slackness, and, above all, dizziness. The reason for this painful state of affairs is perfectly clear. We are living in a world in which nothing is made to man’s measure; there exists a monstrous discrepancy between man’s body, man’s mind and the things which at the present time constitute the elements of human existence; everything is disequilibrium. SIMONE WEIL, OPPRESSION AND LIBERTY”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“The great difficulty is that if we are our own, then our moral horizons cannot be given, only chosen. And that means that the only assurance we can ever have that we are living morally must come from within ourselves.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“Once I am liberated from all social, moral, natural, and religious values, I become responsible for the meaning of my own life. With no God to judge or justify me, I have to be my own judge and redeemer. This burden manifests as a desperate need to justify our lives through identity crafting and expression”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

“Our faith in merit is spiritually and morally harmful for parents and children, teachers and students, winners and losers, individuals and communities. And it is based on the belief that we are our own.”
― Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World