John Eldredge Quotes

You have only one life to live.It would be best to live your own.

The beauty of a woman is first a soulful beauty. And yes, as we live it out, own it, inhabit our beauty, we do become more lovely. More alluring. As the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, "Self flashes off frame and face." Our true self becomes reflected in our appearance. But it flows from the inside

We think you'll find that every woman in her heart of hearts longs for three things: to be romanced, to play an irreplaceable role in a great adventure, and to unveil beauty. That's what makes a woman come alive.

Have you thought about His (God) handling of the gospel? God needs to get a message out to the human race, without which they will perish ... foreve r. What's the plan? First, He starts with the most unlikely group ever: a couple of prostitutes, a few fishermen with no better than a second-grade education, a tax collector. Then, he passes the ball to us. Unbelievable.

Our whole journey into authentic masculinity centers around those cool-of-the-day talks with God. Simple questions change hassles to adventures; the events of our lives become opportunities for initiation.

So you can't demand the broken to live as if they were whole. Discipline is not the issue; apply discipline and you'll make it worse. What is needed is healing.

The truth of the gospel is intended to free us to love God and others with our whole heart. When we ignore this heart aspect of our faith and try to live out our religion solely as correct doctrine or ethics, our passion is crippled, or perverted, and the divorce of our soul from the heart purposes of God toward us is deepened. The

Few things can mess you up as badly as trying to do your best. For the tender heart, the earnest heart, it is so discouraging to give all you have trying to do what you think Jesus would have you do, and find yourself falling short, sabotaging your own efforts at every turn. Discouragement and shame settle in like a long Seattle rain.
And this is what most Christians experience as the Christian life: Try harder; feel worse.

So long as man remains no real threat to the Enemy, Satan's line to him is 'You're fine'. But after you do take sides, it becomes 'Your heart is bad and you know it'.

The intellectual support for UNBELIEF is about as stable as the stock market.

(Satan's) first goal, of course, is to make sure we never meet the Prince who is Jesus of Nazareth or experience a taste of the Great Ball, But once we have, Satan's second and lifelong purpose with each of us is to make sure we never know who we really are; indeed, to keep us living the life of a cellar maid rather than a princess. Even though we who are believers have tasted the Ball and the love of the Prince in beginning ways, the voices of the stepsisters continue to speak to us in tones varying from whispers to shouts, and like Cinderella, each of us has our own years as a "cellar maid" that the enemy can whisper to us about, causing us to wonder if this isn't who we really are after all.

Instead of asking, 'What should a woman do - what is her role?' it would be far more helpful to ask, 'What is a woman - what is her design?' and, 'Why did God place Woman in our midst?

We describe a person without compassion as "heartless," and we urge him or her to "have a heart." Our deepest hurts we call "heartaches." Jilted lovers are "brokenhearted." Courageous soldiers are "bravehearted." The truly evil are "black-hearted" and saints have "hearts of gold." If we need to speak at the most intimate level, we ask for a "heart-to-heart" talk. "Lighthearted" is how we feel on vacation. And when we love someone as truly as we may, we love "with all our heart." But when we lose our passion for life, when a deadness sets in which we cannot ...

One of the deepest of all human longings is the longing to belong, to be a part of things, to be invited in. We want to be part of the fellowship. Where did that come from?

Our lives are not a random series of events; they tell a Story that has meaning.

The warrior learns to master the art of holding fast to dreams while accepting the rigors of becoming the kind of man who can be entrusted with those dreams;

The true test of a man, the beginning of his redemption, actually starts when he can no longer rely on what he's used all his life. The real journey begins when the false self fails.

When a woman forsakes her vulnerability because she's been hurt or because she lives in a dangerous world or doesn't want to be used, she loses something essential about being a woman.

What have we to offer, really, other than who we are and what God has been pouring into our lives? It was not by accident that you were born; it was not by chance that you have the desires you do. The Victorious Trinity has planned on your being here now, "for such a time as this" (Esther 4:14). We need you.

All of the happiness we have ever known and all of the happiness we hope to find is unreachable without a heart.

We are not inviting - we are guarded. Most of our energy is spent trying to hide our true selves, and control our worlds to have some sense of security.

A woman who is striving invites others to strive. The message - sometimes implicit in her actions, sometimes explicit through her words - is, "Get your act together. Life is uncertain. There is no time for your heart here. Shape up. Get busy. That's what is important." She does not say, "All is well. All shall be well." Her fear doesn't allow it. She is withholding the very things her world needs.

Frodo could not be a hero unless he was born into a story with many chapters already played out before his own. His moment derives its weight and urgency from the moments that have come before.

In order to understand how a man receives a wound, you must understand the central truth of a boy's journey to manhood: Masculinity is bestowed. A boy learns who he is and what he's got from a man, or the company of men. He cannot learn it any other place. He cannot learn it from other boys, and he cannot learn it from the world of women.

I daresay we've heard a bit about original sin, but not nearly enough about original glory, which comes before sin and is deeper to our nature. We were crowned with glory and honor. Why does a woman long to be beautiful? Why does a man hope to be found brave? Because we remember, if only faintly, that we were once more than we are now.

The early Celtic Christians called the Holy Spirit 'the wild goose.' And the reason why is they knew that you cannot tame him.

Religion and its defenders have always been the most insidious enemy of the true faith precisely because they are not glaring opponents; they are impostors. A raving pagan is easier to dismiss than an elder in your church. Before Jesus came along, the Pharisees ran the show. Everybody took what they said as gospel - even though it didn't sound like good news at all. But we wrestle not against flesh and blood. The Pharisees and their brethren down through the ages have merely acted - unknowingly, for the most part - as puppets, the mouthpiece of the Enemy.

Sex can be such a stark barometer for a marriage.

My heart matters to God. My heart has always mattered to him ...

I have a call to speak, to write, to do sort of deep-heart surgery in people's lives.

Corporate policies and procedures are designed with one aim: to harness a man to the plow and make him produce. But the soul refuses to be harnessed; it knows nothing of Day Timers and deadlines and P&L statements. The soul longs for passion, for freedom, for life.

This is why the "apply some principles" approach to marriage improvement doesn't work. So long as we choose to turn a blind eye to how we are fallen as men or women, and to the unique style of relating that we have forged out of our sin and brokenness, we will continue to do damage to our marriages.

It is the thoughts and intents of the heart that shape a person's life.

Most men think they are simply here on earth to kill time - and it's killing them.

All men die; few men ever really live.

The guy who sits in front of the television is unengaged. That man is a bad man.

Should the king in exile pretend he is happy there?

Should he not seek his own country?

His miseries are his ally; they urge him on. Let them grow, if need be. But do not forsake the secret of life; do not despise those kingly desires. We abandon the most important journey of our lives when we abandon desire. We leave our hearts by the side of the road and head off in the direction of fitting in, getting by, being productive, what have you. Whatever we might gain – money, position, the approval of others, or just absence of the discontent self – it's not worth it.

We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it's our life or our possessions and property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand.8

For what shall we do when we wake one day to find we have lost touch with our heart and with it the very refuge where God's presence resides? a

Most people don't even try to learn the ways of the kingdom; they just go about their days with a practical agnosticism, hoping things work out, tossing up prayers like they hope to score on a Jesus lottery ticket.

Emasculation happens in marriage as well. Women are often attracted to the wilder side of a man, but once having caught him they settle down to the task of domesticating him. Ironically, if he gives in he'll resent her for it, and she in turn will wonder where the passion has gone.

If we can reawaken that fierce quality in a man, hook it up to a higher purpose, release the warrior within, then the boy can grow up and become truly masculine.

Despite what many modern educators would say, this is not a psychological disturbance brought on by violent television or chemical imbalance. Aggression is part of the masculine design; we are hardwired for it.

What is this enemy that scripture calls "the world?" Is it drinking and dancing and smoking? Is it going to the movies or playing cards? That is a shallow and ridiculous approach to holiness. It numbs us to the fact that good and evil are much more serious. No, the world is not a place or a set of behaviors. It is any system built by our collective sin. It is all our false selves coming together to reward and destroy each other. Take all the posers out there, put them together in an office, or a club, or a church and what you get is what the scriptures mean by "the world." The world is a carnival of counterfeits - counterfeit battles, counterfeit adventures, counterfeit beauties. Men should think of it as a corruption of their strength. "Battle your way to the top," says the World, "and you are a man." Why is it then that the men that get there are often the emptiest, most frightened, prideful posers around?

Caring for your heart is also how you protect your relationship with God ... [The heart] is where we commune with him. It is where we hear his voice. Most of the folks I know who have never heard God speak to them are the same folks who live far from their hearts.

Every man is part boy and part man. God requires the man to step up and play the man; but to the boy he offers comfort and healing. Be kind to the boy inside. It is the man God is calling to face down the next lion, but the boy he treats with genuine kindness. Do the same - be kind to yourself, your fears, your feelings of inadequacy. Don't despise the fact that places in you still feel young; shame never heals, never encourages, never makes whole. Give grace to those places that feel six or ten or even thirteen.

No wonder when he steps into the heavens to accept the throne the cry goes up, "Worthy! Worthy! Worthy! Make him king!" This man is so worthy.

This is why, if you want to get to know someone, you need to know their story. Their life is a story. It, too, has a past and a future. It, too, unfolds in a series of scenes over the course of time.

Simone Weil was absolutely right- beauty and affliction are the only two things that can pierce our hearts. Because this is so true, we must have a measure of beauty in our lives proportionate to our affliction. No more. Much more. Is this not God's prescription for us? Just take a look around.

There is something else I am after, out here in the wild. I am searching for an even more elusive prey ... something that can only be found through the help of wilderness. I am looking for my heart.

Teach a man a rule and you help him solve a problem; teach a man to walk with God and you help him solve the rest of his life.

You clean and organize; you demand perfection - did you ever wonder why?

As Robert Bly laments in Iron John, Some women want a passive man if they want a man at all; the church wants a tamed man - they are called priests; the university wants a domesticated man - they are called tenure-track people; the corporation wants a ... sanitized, hairless, shallow man.

In the end, it doesn't matter how well we have performed or what we have accomplished - a life without heart is not worth living.

We don't need accountability groups; we need fellow warriors, someone to fight alongside, someone to watch our back.

This is the time for a young man to stop saying, "Why is life so hard?" He takes the hardness as the call to fight, to rise up, take it on.

The spirit of our day is a soft acceptance of everything- except deep conviction in anything. The cry used to be for 'tolerance,' by which we meant, 'We have very strong differences, but we will not let those be the cause of hatred or violence between us.' Now it is something else, where all convictions are softened to second or third place while we all agree to enjoy the world as much as we can. But truth is not like conviction. Conviction might be a matter of personal opinion, but truth is like a great mountain, solid and immovable whether we like it or even acknowledge it.

Now yes, yes, creation sometimes screams a confusing message - fear, pain, grief. Fire burns, rivers flood, winds go hurricane, the earth shudders so hard it levels cities. But you must remember - this was not so in Eden. Mankind fell, surrendering this earth to the evil one. St. Paul says that creation groans for the day of its restoration (see Rom. 8:18–22), making it clear that everything is not as it was meant to be. People come to terrible conclusions when they assume this world is exactly as God intended. (An assumption that has wrought havoc in the sciences.) The earth is broken.
Which only makes the beauty that does flow so generously that much more astounding. And reassuring.

The world has been wrong about you. They've hated your glory - just as the Evil One hates the glory of God. But we need your gift. Come forth.

I shall take the heart," returned the Tin Woodman; "for brains do not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world." (L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz)

You live in a world at war. Spiritual attack must be a category you think in or you will misunderstand more than half of what happens in your marriage.

The true story of every person in this world is not the story you see, the external story. The true story of each person is the journey of his or her heart.

When we are in the darkness, we begin to feel like we have always been there. But it is not true. David reminds himself that God has been faithful in the past; God will be faithful again. He urges himself to put his hope in God because the morning will come.

Every story has a villain. Every story also has a hero. The Great Love Story the Scriptures are telling us about also reveals a Lover who longs for you. The story of your life is also the story of the long and passionate pursuit of your heart by the One who knows you best and loves you most.

Eternal life is not primarily duration but quality of life, life to the limit.

For above all else, the Christian life is a love affair of the heart.

You are radiant this evening. You are absolutely breathtaking.

I'm well aware that it's life I need, and it's life I'm looking for. But the offer has gotten "interpreted" by well-meaning people to say, "Oh, well. Yes, of course ... God intends life for you. But that is eternal life, meaning, because of the death of Jesus Christ you can go to heaven when you die." And that's true ... in a way. But it's like saying getting married means, "Because I've given you this ring, you will be taken care of in your retirement." And in the meantime? Isn't there a whole lot more to the relationship in the meantime? (It's in the meantime that we're living out our days, by the way.) Are we just lost at sea? What did Jesus mean when he promised us life? I go back to the source, and what I find is just astounding.

We're told that you can have a relationship with Jesus, but most Christians don't experience Jesus personally like that. They just don't. We honor Him. We respect Him. We worship Him. We don't experience Him and His personality like we do the people we love the most in our lives.

Don't ask yourself what the world needs, ask yourself what makes you come alive, because what the world needs are men who have come alive.

Desire, both the whispers and the shouts, is the map we have been given to find the only life worth living.

We don't get to stay in hiding until we are whole; Jesus invites us to live as an inviting woman now, and find our healing along the way.

Grief is a form of validation; it says the wound mattered. It mattered. You mattered. That's not the way life was supposed to go.

Sometimes the idea of living as a hermit appeals to all of us. No demands, no needs, no pain, no disappointments. But that is because we have been hurt, are worn out.

The Lover of our souls, the One who has pursued us down through space and time, who gave his own life to rescue us from the Kingdom of Darkness, has made it clear: He does not want to lose us. He longs for us to be with him forever.

One of the great wonders of Christianity is that you were born into your times, to set your times aright.

You will find it hard to hear from God until you let go your rights and your agenda.

Most of the contexts are life and death, by the way, and God is your only hope. Your ezer. If he is not there beside you ... you are dead. A better translation therefore of ezer would be "lifesaver." Kenegdo means alongside, or opposite to, a counterpart.

Only by walking with God can we hope to find the path that leads to life. That is what it means to be a disciple. After all
aren't we 'followers of Christ'? Then by all means, let's actually follow him. Not ideas about him. Not just his principles. Him.

Truth be told, most of us are faking our way through life. We pick only those battles we are sure to win, only those adventures we are sure to handle, only those beauties we are sure to rescue.

Jesus said, "Do not throw your pearls to pigs" (Matt. 7:6). By this we don't think he was calling some people pigs. He was saying, "Look - be careful that you do not give something precious to someone who, at best, cannot recognize its beauty, or at worst, will trample on it." Consider your feminine heart and beauty your treasure, your pearls.

The modern era has brought up immense conveniences but at what price. The human heart is desperate for something more than a quicker serving of popcorn.

Adventure, with all its requisite danger and wildness, is a deeply spiritual longing written into the soul of man.

You learn a great deal about the true nature of a person in the way they love, why they love, and, in what they love.

The culture of women in the church today is crippled by some very pervasive lies. "To be spiritual is to be busy. To be spiritual is to be disciplined. To be spiritual is to be dutiful." No, to be spiritual is to be in Romance with God. The desire to be romanced lies deep in the heart of every women. It is for such that you were made. Are you ARE romanced, and ever will be.

Of course, none of this can happen for us until we give our lives back to God. We cannot know the joy or the life or the freedom of heart I've described until we surrender our lives to Jesus and surrender them totally ... We turn, and give ourselves body, soul, and spirit back to God, asking him to cleanse our hearts and make them new. And he does. He gives us a new heart. And he comes to dwell there, in our hearts.

God's relationship with us and with our world is just that: a relationship. As with every relationship, there's a certain amount of unpredictability, and the ever-present likelihood that you'll get hurt. The ultimate risk anyone ever takes is to love, for as C. S. Lewis says, "Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal." But God does give it, again and again and again, until he is literally bleeding from it all. God's willingness to risk is just astounding - far beyond what any of us would do were we in his position.

The glory of God is man fully alive. (Saint Irenaeus)

Most of us live in a fog. It's like life is a movie we arrived to 20 minutes late. You know something important seems to be going on. But we can't figure out the story. We don't know what part we're supposed to play or what the plot is.

I'm married. I have three children. I have a mortgage to pay. The plumbing breaks and the yard needs trimming. However, what my wife and children need most from me is my passion for them.

You are the son of a kind, strong, and engaged Father, a Father wise enough to guide you in the Way, generous enough to provide for your journey, offering to walk with you every step. This is perhaps the hardest thing for us to believe - really believe, down deep in our hearts, so that it changes us forever, changes the way we approach each day.

And loneliness is something we share with him. "The whole conviction of my life," wrote Thomas Wolfe, "now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon peculiar to myself and a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence." To be missed, or misunderstood. To be judged unfairly. To be wanted for what you can do, rather than who you are. To go on for years unappreciated, even unknown by those closest to you.

Can you picture Ghandi or Buddha storming into the polling place of a local election, shouting, overturning tables, sending the participants fleeing? Now throw a small carnival into the mix, which they also need rout. Impossible. Whoever did this would have to be really committed to clear the building. Fierce and intentional.
This is a breathtaking quality - especially when compared to our present age where doubt masquerades as humility, passivity cloaks as rest, and emasculated indecision poses as laid-back enlightenment.

Without the anticipation of better things ahead, we will have no heart for the journey.

Somehow we have overlooked the fact this treasured called the heart can also be broken, has been broken, and now lies in pieces down under the surface. When it comes to habits we cannot quit or patterns we cannot stop, anger that flies out of nowhere, fears we cannot overcome, or weaknesses we hate to admit
much of what troubles us comes out of the broken places in our hearts crying out for relief.
Jesus speaks as if we are all brokenhearted. We would do well to trust His perspective on this.

A boy wants to attack something - and so does a man, even if it's only a little white ball on a tee. He wants to whack it into kingdom come.

Men want a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue. That is what is written in their hearts. That is what little boys play at. That is what men's movies are about. You just see it. It is undeniable.

We don't live in the Garden. We live far from Eden. Every life is full of heartaches. Every life, frankly, is unspeakably sad.

How much more so when it comes to the deep truths of the Christian faith. God loves you; you matter to him. That is a fact, stated as a proposition. I imagine most of you have heard it any number of times. Why, then, aren't we the happiest people on earth? It hasn't reached our hearts. Facts stay lodged in the mind, for the most part. They don't speak at the level we need to hear. Proposition speaks to the mind, but when you tell a story, you speak to the heart. We've been telling each other stories since the beginning of time. It is our way of communicating the timeless truths, passing them down. And that's why when Jesus comes to town, he speaks in a way that will get past all our intellectual defenses and disarm our hearts. He tells a certain kind of story.

Now, if you believed both assumptions, if they were woven into your deepest convictions about the world, you would want to learn to pray like a soldier wants to learn to use his weapon, like a smoke jumper wants to learn survival skills. We really have no idea what sort of breakthrough is actually possible until we learn to pray. Perhaps we, too, will be ending droughts and stopping wildfires.