You're Only Human Quotes

“Have you ever felt that your parents, or spouse, or your God loved you, and yet wondered if they actually liked you? Love is so loaded with obligations and duty that it often loses all emotive force, all sense of pleasure and satisfaction. Like can remind us of an aspect of God’s love that we far too easily forget. Forgetting God’s delight and joy in us stunts our ability to enjoy God’s love. Forgiveness—as beautiful and crucial as it is—is not enough. Unless it is understood to come from love and to lead back to love, unless we understand the gospel in terms of God’s fierce delight in us and not merely a wiping away of prior offenses, unless we understand God’s battle for us as a dramatic personal rescue and not merely a cold forensic process, we have ignored most of the Scriptures as well as the needs of the human condition.”
― Kelly M. Kapic, You're Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News

“While I understand where they come from, claims that God can’t stand to be in the presence of sin are fundamentally opposed to the gospel and the nature of God. This claim and its many variants are backward: it’s sin that can’t stand the presence of God. To say that God can’t stand the presence of sin makes him out to be like the person I heard of who couldn’t stand the presence of a spider and would demand that someone else deal with it. It gives sin leverage over God. It makes God out to be either finicky and weak or a kind of irritable, narcissistic fusspot who is more concerned that things go smoothly than that his beloved is safe and whole. It makes God out to be the kind of being who doesn’t have a beloved at all, except perhaps himself. It undercuts and denies the divinity of Christ, who, as God incarnate, was present with and to sinners his whole life. It misunderstands the Holy Spirit, who comes to dwell in sinners in order that they might be saints. It can develop from the kind of theology that sees justice only in terms of retribution with little concern for restoration.”
― Kelly M. Kapic, You're Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News

“Our sense that we lack time often leads us to want immediate and radical improvement in ourselves. We discover, to the contrary, that God has purposes in taking his time and that, since process itself is also a good aspect of the created wold, we should learn to honor rather than belittle it.”
― Kelly M. Kapic, You're Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News

“To understand this conflict we need to think less in terms of isolated individualism and more in terms of “self-in-relationship, corporately constituted yet still a distinct self.”
― Kelly M. Kapic, You're Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God's Design and Why That's Good News

“Who am I? The solitary query mocks me. Whoever I am, You know me. I am Yours, O God!”
― Kelly M. Kapic, You're Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God's Design and Why That's Good News

“Many of us fail to understand that our limitations are a gift from God, and therefore good. This produces in us the burden of trying to be something we are not and cannot be.”
― Kelly M. Kapic, You're Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God's Design and Why That's Good News

“When I complain about getting older, my wife sometimes laughs and says to me, “You have two options: either you are getting older or you are dead.”
― Kelly M. Kapic, You're Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God's Design and Why That's Good News

“We sometimes make meditating on Scripture sound too difficult, too sophisticated, too spiritual for those of us who are not supersaints. But meditating is just taking a biblical truth (e.g., “The Lord is near”) and savoring it throughout our day, thinking about it, resting in its assurance, allowing the thought to run over us like a purifying stream on a hot summer day. These truths often take a while to move into our souls, so we must spend time with and rest in them.”
― Kelly M. Kapic, You're Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God's Design and Why That's Good News

“Go sing hymns outside the windows of the nearest nursing home. Go sit in the woods or by a pond and just be still. Memorize Scripture—better yet, memorize Scripture with friends. Sing. Write poetry, read fiction, journal your prayers to God and send a text to a friend you are thinking about. Countless other examples could be given.”
― Kelly M. Kapic, You're Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God's Design and Why That's Good News

“Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”
― Kelly M. Kapic, You're Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God's Design and Why That's Good News