Erwin Raphael McManus Quotes

Home is ultimately not about a place to live but about the people with whom you are most fully alive. Home is about love, relationship, community, and belonging, and we are all searching for home.

In an ideal world, the voices that teach us language teach us self-respect, self-confidence, and self-esteem. Those same voices also form in us humility and gratitude, and as those voices inform our inner voices, they also pass on wisdom.

The serving that we are called to requires direct contact. You cannot wash the feet of a dirty world if you refuse to touch it.

What is your idea of you? Who is it that you have decided to become? If your greatest work of art is the life you live, and ultimately life is a creative act, what life will you choose to leave behind as your masterpiece?

Three powerful life-changing words passed on from God to us: Now choose life! Right now, this moment, put away the baggage from the past, shake yourself free from the fear of the future unknown. Right now, choose life - seize your divine moment. A

For believers in persecuted countries. We champion their sacrifice and willingness to stand for Christ, even at the cost of their own lives. Yet we consider laying aside our traditions and cultural preferences as an unreasonable expectation.

If he's just watching, then we're all unwilling participants in the universe's biggest reality show - the original Survivor.

Discipleship ... a process of unleashing the creative potential in each person.

Robert's Rules of Order becomes the guiding text rather than the pattern of the apostolic church.

It takes courage to not only accept our limitations but embrace our potential. To deny our creative nature is to choose a life where we are less and thus responsible for less. We see ourselves as created beings, so we choose to survive. When we see ourselves as creative beings, we must instead create.

God is not a drug, and He certainly does not create experiences and emotions that make us feel better but not become better.

While religions have historically tried to make us the same, Jesus calls us to be different. If you have ever experienced this, you know your soul bristled at the demand to quietly get in line and conform. But something in your gut told you this was wrong. If there was a God, his value would not be uniformity, but uniqueness. And you were right. Imprinted on your soul is the fingerprint of God. There is something inside you that resists surrendering your soul to legalism. The good news is that all that time it wasn't you fighting against God; you were fighting for what God has created you to become.

Unfortunately, the people who have the greatest influence in our lives rarely understand the power of their words to shape who we become. They never fully understand that what informs us forms us. Words spoken into a soul are like the hands of a potter pressed against wet clay.

While never violating our uniqueness, we move together, united in heart and soul. Our greatness is unleashed in the context of community. When we move together, God is most perfectly revealed in us.

the unexpected truth that the safest place for a sinful person to go is to God.

The soul is both fragile and resilient...The artisan soul must be both tender and tough.

You'll be hard pressed to find any story in the Scriptures in which God becomes angry because someone has too much faith, too much determination, too much resolve. The truth is, we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. God puts the bow and the arrows in our hands and tells us to shoot and to strike. And instead of pressing the limits of what God could do in and through our lives, we assume that his intention for us is less and so we settle fo what we can do rather than what God intended to do through us.

irony is that, while secular leadership has become blatantly spiritual, Christian leadership has become blatantly (and blandly) secular.

Artists love without reservation. They give their hearts completely and leave nothing on the table. They are naked and unashamed. They leave no room for pretension. And because they have given all of themselves, they live without regret.

Average is always a safe choice, and it is the most dangerous choice you can make.

There is no proof of creativity without action.

The more isolated and disconnected we are, the more shattered and distorted our self-identity. We are not healthy when we are alone. We find ourselves when we connect to others. Without community we don't know who we are ...
When we live outside of healthy community, we not only lose others. We lose ourselves ... Who we understand ourselves to be is dramatically affected for better or worse by those we hold closest to us.

Most of us are still in some small way victims of the Industrial Revolution. Whether through our grandparents, our parents, or our own experience, we were raised to believe that our place in life required compliance and conformity rather than creativity and uniqueness. We have been raised in a world where information is deemed far more important than imagination. Adults replaced dreams with discipline when they were finally ready to grow up and be responsible for their lives. Whether this contrast was reinforced on an assembly line, in a cubicle, or in a classroom, the surest path to acceptance in society is accepting standardization. And we more than willingly, relinquish our uniqueness.

The fuel of ambition is not the problem; it is the focus of ambition that frees or betrays us.

If we are inherently spiritual creatures, we are by our nature creative beings, yet we live in the fear that if we aspire to be more we will discover ourselves to be less.

Jesus's early followers formed a movement of dreamers and visionaries.

The first and most important step in the process of becoming genuinely is to be once again authenticated by the original designer.

Creativity should be an everyday experience. Creativity should be as common as breathing. We breathe, therefore we create.

The life of faith is less about gathering information than it is about expanding imagination. The movement Jesus started was a movement of dreamers and visionaries, not a movement of academics and theologians.

Who do we become when we stop allowing all the voices in our head to crowd out the one voice we must hear to come to life?

Who told you that you were naked? Who have you been listening to?..'

This is a tragic reminder that we humans have the strange capacity to live a soulless life. Our inner voice was never supposed to be simply an echo. Our inner voice was always to resonate with the voice of God. Every other voice will either make us less than we were intended to be or convince us that we are more than we really are. Neither self-loathing nor self-worship helps us find our authentic voice. It is only when our inner voice responds to the voice of God that we begin to truly find to find our own voice. As critical as it is for us to understand that art is always an extension of ourselves, the creative act is also an expression of our essence.

It is equally important for us to realize that our guiding narrative determines the story we tell through our lives. Our inner voice not only informs us of who we are, but affects everything we touch. And in the end, becomes the driving force through which we strive to shape the world around us. The principal creative act described in Genesis chapter 1 begins with God speaking the universe into existence. God speaks out of who He is and everything in creation is a declaration of His glory.

Frankly, the people who whine the most about how hard their lives are have very rarely experienced much to be disappointed about. They seem to find solace in their most negative memories, using these as a blank check that abdicates them from all personal responsibility. "I am how I am because of the pain of my past. If you had experienced what I have experienced, you would understand my bitterness, my anger, my paralysis, my despair.

We are all time voyagers leaving history in our wake, pioneering into the future.

To create is to reflect the image of God. To create is an act of worship.

I have come to realize, after over thirty years of studying human creativity, that the great divide is not between those who are artists and those who are not, but between those who understand that they are creative and those who have become convinced that they are not.

The best use of technology is to enhance the power of worship that is an expression of spirit and truth.

Our lives will become our greatest works of art not only when our relationships are a beautiful expression of love, acceptance, and intimacy, but when we have a deep sense of purpose that produces accomplishments that express, for us, success and significance.

Since part of our creative responsibility is to move from imagination to image, we need to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ and allow our imagination once again to be the playground of God. And once our dreams and visions are the material that has been passed on to us by a divine imagination, then it is time to dream, to risk, and to create.

Most people who describe themselves as visionaries are actually saying something quite different. They are abdicating their responsibility for the details. Details matter. The more someone or something matters to us, the more the details relating to them matter to us.

Whoever tells the best story shapes the culture.

When we are passionate about God, we can trust our passions.

The Ten Commandments are the lowest possible standard of humane living.

Whether we realize it or not, everything we do is an expression of either how alive our souls are or how much we have allowed ourselves to be deadened over time.

Love never comes without wounds; faith never comes without failure.

What if the creative act is not an act against God but a reflection of His image within us?