Another Brennan Manning Moment:

Probably the moment in my own life when I was closest to the Truth who is Jesus Christ was the experience of being a hopeless derelict in the gutter in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In his novel The Moviegoer, Walker Percy says: “Only once in my life was the grip of everydayness broken: when I lay bleeding in the ditch.” Paradoxically, such an experience of powerlessness does not make one sad. It is a great relief because it makes us rely not on our own strength but on the limitless power of God. The realization that God is the main agent makes the yoke easy, the burden light, and the heart still.

[HT: It's a Beautiful Gospel]

We're not adequate?

Ah, sorry for making myself scarce around here. Blogging has sort of fallen through the cracks. I'm not through here, just needing to find a niche in my day where blogging can routinely fit.

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Saw this wonderful quote from one of my favorite books, Brennan Manning's The Ragamuffin Gospel. The quote, by the way, was featured in a post over at It's a beautiful gospel. Here 'tis:

The portrait of Peter, the rock who proved to be a sand pile, speaks to every ragamuffin across the generations. Lloyd Ogilvie notes: “Peter had built his whole relationship with Jesus Christ on his assumed capacity to be adequate. That’s why he took his denial of the Lord so hard. His strength, loyalty, and faithfulness were his self-generated assets of discipleship. The fallacy in Peter’s mind was this: he believed his relationship was dependent on his consistency in producing the qualities he thought had earned him the Lord’s approval.

“Many of us face the same problem. We project into the Lord our own measured standard of acceptance. Our whole understanding of him is based in a quid pro quo of bartered love. He will love us if we are good, moral, and diligent. But we have turned the tables; we try to live so that he will love us, rather than living because he has already loved us.”

I know many Christians who "turn the tables" in this way. And I know many non-believers who think that the idea that we might not actually "deserve" the love of God is sheer effrontery. The notion that "but for the grace of God" we are in deep trouble turns out to be, for these people, supremely arrogant and judgmental.

Grace, it seems, is a hard doctrine to swallow. Buried beneath its winsome finish is a difficult truth: we deserve nothing. Calvinists may be outspoken on this score, but most evangelicals throw the word grace around while avoiding this core truth. Perhaps that's the reason that many non-believers find the doctrine of grace less attractive than we expect. And yet without this core truth, grace would not be grace.

Anyway, good to be back at WF. I'll try to visit more often!

"...the spiritual revolution of God's love..."

Son Nate hasn't been blogging much lately, but when he does it's well worth a look. His most recent: God loves you. Seriously. It seems that Nate was describing the message of Brennan Manning to a friend. He said:

His central message is that God loves us as we are and not as we should be.

And Nate's friend answered:

Well, yeah, that's good, but the danger of that message is when it's presented in such a way that keeps us from wanting something more.

To which Nate blogs this really profoundly on-target response:

No, I'm convinced there really is nothing more, sir. Nothing at all. Could it be that this attitude is really a fear-hounded mindset terrified of releasing the vulgar masses into the true freedom- freedom to mess up, act unspiritually, miss church, whatever- that God bought and handed out unconditionally to formerly dead people? Because true freedom might not look so "spiritual."

As C.S Lewis brilliantly portrays in the Screwtape Letters, Satan considers God "so unspiritual."

But if they plunge themselves into the spiritual revolution of God's love, they just might neglect the very important tasks of managing circumstances, manipulating appearances, garnering spiritual accolades, ensuring proper behavior, climbing the social ladder, maintaining comfort, keeping in good health, listening to approved music, reading approved books, eating approved cookies, wearing approved underwear.

Oh, man, Nate, where do you get this stuff?

Brennan Manning

My son Nate is going to a Brennan Manning conference this weekend. If you don't know his work, check him out.

Booksnip (4)

From Brennan Manning's The Importance of Being Foolish:

The French poet Paul Claudel said that the greatest sin is to lose the sense of sin. The man without a lively sense of the horrow of sin does not know Jesus Christ crucified. The knowledge that sin exists and that we are sinners comes only from the Cross. We can delude ourselves into thinking that sin is only an abberation or a lack of maturity; that preoccupation with security, pleasure, and power is caused by oppresive social structures and personality quirks; that we are sinful but not sinners, since we are mere victims of circumstances, compulsions, environment, addictions, upbringing, and so forth. The Passion nails these lies and rationalizations to the Cross of Truth.