Hannah Anderson Quotes

Discernment gives you the ability to both appreciate the subtle beauty of a Renoir and spot a fake.

Your life has intrinsic value, not simply because of who you are as an individual, but because of who He is as your God.

What we choose to speak about and how we speak about it are part of the message we send to each other and the larger culture we create.

Instead of finding identity in our roles - in being fathers and mothers, teachers and writers and pastors - we must find identity in being image bearers of God.

One of the most compelling things about this majestic God, this God who existed before the worlds began, is that He understands our weakness. As David sang in the Judean hillsides, "He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust." So much so, that even back in the emptiness of the cosmos, He knew that we would never be able to truly seek Him for ourselves. He knew that in our confusion, we would stumble about in the darkness, unable to find Him and unable to understand ourselves. He knew this, and so in those moments before He laid the foundations of the earth, He planned a way that He would find us.

But this is also why Jesus calls us to come to HIm. By coming to Jesus, we remember who we are and who we are not. By coming to Him, we come face to face with God and with ourselves. "It is only in our encounter with a personal God," writes philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand, "that we become fully aware of our condition as creatures, and fling from us the last particle of self-glory.

What if we could see the world as God sees it - in all its brokenness and beauty - and in seeing, be able to do more than endure this life?

When we believe that with enough effort, enough organization, or enough commitment, we can fix things that are broken, we set ourselves in God's place. And when we do, we reap stress, restlessness, and anxiety. Instead of submitting to His yoke, we break it and run wild, trampling the very ground we are meant to cultivate.

Humility is knowing where we came from and who our people are. Humility is understanding that without God we are nothing . . . Or as . . . Andrew Murray writes in his classic book Humility, "Humility is simply acknowledging the truth of [our] position as creature and yielding to God His place.

If, however, we spend our days talking about good, worthy, glorious things, there is the strong likelihood that our lives will be filled with good, worthy, glorious things.

It is a quality of life to be cultivated that goes deeper than a checklist. Thus "discernment does not change the challenges we face; it changes our ability to face them.

And now you can see the relationship between pride and stress. Pride convinces us that we are stronger and more capable than we actually are. Pride convinces us that we must do and be more than we are able. And when we try, we find ourselves feeling "thin, sort of stretched . . . like butter that has been scraped over too much bread." (The Fellowship of the Ring) We begin to fall apart physically, emotionally, and spiritually for the simple reason that we are not existing as we were meant to exist.

We are not called to embody Jesus ourselves; He has already been incarnated and is still even now! No, we are not called to be Jesus; we are called to fall at His feet and worship Him. We are called to affirm that "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth." [John 1:14] And it is through this worship, through recognizing His rightful place, that we are finally humbled.

When we are consumed with God's glory, we forget to worry about our own. When our eyes are fixed on Him as the source of all goodness and truth and beauty, we accept that we are not. When we are enamored by His worth and majesty, we can stop being so enamored with ourselves. And fascinatingly, when we seek God's glory, we'll be able to appreciate it in the people around us. Instead of seeing them as threats to our own glory, we will see them as beautiful reflections of His.

If we speak lightly about serious things, and seriously about inconsequential things - we will be unable to discern what is good because our entire moral ballast will shift.