Audacious!

Top 10 Favorite Quotes:

1.  "The most repetitive request I've raised to Jesus for three solid decades has been this: Give me a heart to love You more than anything I can see or touch. Grant me love for You, Jesus. This is what I want more than anything. Be the driving desire of my life."

2.  "If it's Christians you don't like, I get it. But I'm asking that you not confuse them - or me, or any other flesh and blood - with Jesus. He is in a class all by Himself. Call me crazy, but for the life of me, I can't find a lot not to like about Him. Who else in the entire human experience is incapable of doing you wrong or leaving you stranded or betraying your trust or wasting your time? Who else never recoils at the sight of the real us? Or gets bored with us? Who else never makes a promise He doesn't have the power to keep?"

3.  "Jesus is always the initiator in every aspect of our relationship with Him. Every time you are driven to pursue Him, it's because He is pursuing you. Every time you have something to say to Him, it's because He's saying something to you. Every time you choose Him, He has already chosen you. Any time you get up before dawn to pray, He is already there waiting for you. You never have a single thought about Him that catches His mind wandering away from you. You cannot beat Jesus to the punch. You cannot beat Jesus to the passion."

4.  "Somewhere in the forsakenness, Someone has been fighting for you all along. Being mishandled by some can loom so large that we feel mishandled by all. Victimization, devastation, loss, rejection, betrayal... Our hearts contract to protect themselves and see to it that love can't worm its way in. Our souls, on the other hand, have been ripped so wide open that nothing anyone can do will ever be enough. We clinch our eyes tightly and refuse to see when the winds and waves are stilled and a Savior walks our way right on top of the water. But we don't have to stay that way... We are not lost causes at lasting relationships... 'But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be provided for you.'"

5.  "We can want things desperately, clawing and clamoring, that we know have the capacity to destroy us. The gratification of desire is so strong that we, with our eyes wide open, are willing to satisfy it today even if we dearly pay for ten thousand tomorrows... It will never be rules that most effectively deter us from jumping headlong into sin. Anyone living in recovery from substance addiction will tell you that sobriety had to become something they deeply wanted and not just deeply needed... The game changer for me was coming to a place where I wanted to love Him and I wanted to seek Him and I wanted to serve Him and I wanted to get up before the sun to talk to Him."

6.  "To love God more is never to love people less. It's to love people best. It's to relieve them of the responsibility of being your false Christ. It's to keep their sins against you from being unforgivable and your sins against them from being ignorable. It's to guard them from our mean-streaks and strong human tendencies to respond to disappointment with punishment. It's to keep the people close by from cutting their wrists on the razor-sharp blades of our insecurities. It's to dull the edge of our cravings to be adored. It's to untie the double knots of codependency. It's to let the affirmations of others be the overflow and not the essential source of our emotional survival. To love God is to guard man... We'll still need friendships and siblings and social outlets. We'll still want to be liked and want to be loved and we still wish for romance. But indescribable freedom comes when we no longer need humans to save us!"

7. "Never think for a moment that Jesus cannot heal a messed up heart. It is His forte... Sweep up every scattered shard of your heart into one huge dustpan and dump it entirely into His palms. He will draw a deep breath, blow away the dirt, and refashion what remains, piece by piece, into a mosaic of starling beauty and sufficient humility to hold something utterly splendid!"

8.  "It's the authentic that exposes the counterfeit. We fall out of a lesser love by falling into a greater one... Inside out delight in God drives so much dross out of the heart that we can dare to trust what we feel."

9. "There's no end to Jesus. No way to wear Him out. No way to end up in a colossal codependent mess. To love Him first is to love others best... We're talking about being swept up with the One you can't tire out and you can't run off. The One who still calls you Beautiful at your ugliest and pulls you up at your lowest. The One who doesn't have to struggle to forgive you. The One who really does keep no record of wrongs. The One who doesn't have to go to counseling to stay with you."

10.  "Freedom is telling God what we desperately want. Trust is asking Him to change our want if gaining it would poison us."

~Beth Moore, Audacious

Song of the Week = Let It Be Jesus (by Chris Tomlin)

"Should I ever be abandoned, should I ever be acclaimed,
Should I ever be surrounded by the fire and the flame,
There's a name I will remember; there's a name I will proclaim:
Let it be - let it be Jesus."