Jennie Allen Quotes

However, we can believe in Christ and be free and still be stuck.

From His eternal perspective, it's tolerable to allow our temporary dreams to fall apart.

Know Scripture, know yourself, and know the need around you.2

Embrace the common: a Sunday afternoon watching sports, Starbucks with a friend, cooking dinner for a neighbor, taking the dog for a walk, heading to a job that is making you more humble and needy because it is so unfulfilling, or working through conflict with a friend you have offended. This and more is all part of it. So do your everyday and your ordinary. Godliness is found and formed in those places. No man or woman greatly used by God has escaped them. Great men and women of God have transformed the mundane, turning neighborhoods into mission fields, parenting into launching the next generation of God's voices, legal work into loving those most hurting, waiting tables into serving and loving in such a way that people see our God.

Weight causes things on earth to fall
to remain grounded. What if the weight of sin holds the same purpose as physical weight? When I curl up on my sofa with God and his Word, that feeling that makes me want to bold should be the feeling that keeps me there with him. It's the weight of my sin pushing me down from the high and lofty places where my pride would rather keep me.

His presence is the only place where invisible weight is lifted. The only place where hidden, broken spaces are mended. The only place where we are defined apart from our successes and our failures.

Great people do not do great things; God does great things through surrendered people.

God is reaching out to us, wanting us to see we need him. But since he is God, we think he wants some song and dance from us - in other words, behavior modification. He actually just wants us. He longs to set us free. And yes, to accomplish all that, he wants us entirely. God is home to us. He is where we were made to be. He is what we were made for. We just forget all that while we are trying to be good and independent.

Even though every piece of today feels small. I'll do today, glancing up and remembering a race is completed the same way this book is completed. Step by step. Word by word. Day by day.

No unique purpose for your life will fill your soul. The only thing that will fulfill and settle your soul is God himself.

When you don't have anything or anyone else on earth, all of a sudden God starts looking really good. Something about us needs to long for heaven. When everything is right and everything works - be honest, we don't long for heaven or for God. We just don

Come back to me. You need me. He says, Go and sin no more (John 8:11),

Surrender is usually dying to self on a daily basis and most often found in the mundane.

You have threads of life blowing around, possibly even strangling you - threads that are meant to bind together and become your unique, God-given contribution to a world in great need.

Daily abandon would prove to be more costly than the reckless kinds of obedience.

Faith is the measure to which we believe God is God. And faith is the measure to which we let God be God.

Our confidence comes from believing God can do anything , then stepping back and letting Him.

I am a human, and we humans arrive with "screwed up" on our foreheads. We come that way, but somewhere between toddlerhood and being a grown-up we learn to wipe off our forehead signs. Sit up straight. To be good. But before God I am no different from these men. My forehead is clean my soul certainly is not. That day on an old, beat-up sofa with some old, beat up guys, I rethought the things of value to people and the types of people I've valued, and I realized that God shown more through those accused and hurting men then than in me.

So if we know no place, no job, no marriage, no child is going to fulfill us perfectly, we can make the choice to quit fighting for happiness in all of it and start to fight for God's glory in it.

Our crosses are our rights ... Because life is not about me, because this world is not my home, because I'm tired of defending myself, and because the God of the universe is my Defender.

At some point, our faith and our words must become our actions and lives. Do we talk more about God than we obey him? We aren't going to get to heaven and have God say, "Thanks for talking about doing so much for me with your friends. That was awesome!" Many of us have sat in Bible studies or retreats or church talking about what we want to change and how we want to live for God, only to go home and back to the routine of life. Change is a funny thing. It takes change to change.

To risk is to willingly place your life in the hand of an unseen God and an unknown future, then to watch him come through. He starts to get real when you live like that.

Stepping out wholly dependent on God to come through, stepping away from what is secure and comfortable exposes the holes in our faith. And then if God comes through, it expands our faith. Something about stepping off cliffs where God leads allows God the opportunity to move in greater ways. When we step off and he shows up, we see him differently than we would if we were standing safely looking over the edge.

We love because he first loved us (1 John 4:19). When we don't love or feel joy or peace or passion, it's because we do not know his love or his joy or peace or passion. He is a person, not a magic pill you take when your life or your soul is broken. He is a person. He is a person you talk to and listen to and love and respect. He's someone you decide to spend time with and dream with, whom you follow and learn from and hurt with, and to whom you ask things - someone you choose over anybody else, over anything else. He is a person - the person who defines my life, sweeps in and changes me. When I let him in. We all want to be free, joyful, and peaceful, but we get reluctant to hand God everything. But that is part of the path to the things he promises us.

We can do one of two things with suffering: we can absorb it and let it change us, or we can let it crush us. Suffering will change you, or it will crush you.

Comparison is often why our important roles shrink to seem so insignificant. Comparison robs us of the joy of obedience.

We hold things. We don't think much about it, but there are hungry people all around us, and God is looking to take the seemingly insignificant little pieces tucked away in our lives to multiply them and feed his people.

You have to thank God for the seemingly good and the seemingly bad because really, you don't know the difference [until we get to heaven].

If I can accept that I am so sinful and so broken that I am likely to hurt anyone close to me on any given day without even being aware of it, I can willingly pass out grace to those who hurt me.

Striving is stealing our joy, our moments.

God is home to us. He is where we were made to be. He is what we were made for. We just forget all that while we are trying to be good and independent. Pretending to be good halts God's movement in our life. Legalism or religion helps us feel better about ourselves, puffs us up, gives us the posture to be critical and judgmental and prideful. Oh, and everything human about us loves that. It feels better to live that way. It feels better to walk independently and all grown-up, not holding hands with your mom on the River Walk when you want to feel cool and like an adult. We want to not need God.

Plastic gods are safe. Plastic gods don't mess with you. Plastic gods don't matter much; they fit in a small crevice of the life you want, the life you were planning to have. And when everything in life is working . . . plastic gods feel like enough.

Because of grace we have nothing to prove. Our confidence is in the security and power God gives us, not in ourselves. To know that you are absolutely treasured, unconditionally, changes you in this way. You feel free, and you want to run with a God who would love you like that. To know that we do not measure up and that we don't have to because of Jesus, because of grace, means that life gets a whole lot more fun.

There is an art to living that is far above the base human instinct of survival. I want to live beautifully.

It is too easy in this country for blessings to become rights, for stuff and money to become what calls the shots in our lives. And before we know it, God's gifts have replaced God himself.

What if the things that have caused the most hurt in your life became the birthplaces of your deepest passions?