In addition to writing more, one of my goals for this year was to read more too. About halfway through January, I was given the idea of keeping track of the books I’m reading, along with the quotes I’ve enjoyed from them (I was inspired to do this by my dear friend, Lauren Sommers). I have a Google doc that I’ve been keeping up with all month and now I’m just plugging that information in here. I’m going to try to do this at the end of every month for 2023.
Limping with God was definitely my favorite from all of these. There’s a whole huge side story about this one involving the author and the loss of his son, Luke, just a few days before the release of this book. The book itself is incredible, but knowing the side story gave me a whole new lens to view it through. There were several places in Chad’s book where you could undeniably see God preparing him in advance for the loss of his son.
I loaned Limping with God out the day after I finished reading it because it was too good not to share. Unfortunately, I did this before I decided to track my favorite quotes, so although I underlined a lot, I didn’t get the chance to add the quotes to my Google doc. This is why there aren’t any quotes from Limping with God in this post. I plan on sharing them later on, but yeah…I highly recommend this book.
I’m not going to give any other commentary about the books I’m listing other than I enjoyed them all! I’ll let the quotes speak for themselves. I’ve attached Amazon links to each one, so if you’re interested in reading one, you’ll know where to find it. Additionally, I would love suggestions for more books to read. I have my February list going already, but I don’t have anything planned for March. If you have something you love, please share it with me. I greatly prefer nonfiction! 🙂
Here are the books that I finished in January, in the order that I finished them:
1. Limping with God – Chad Bird
2. Low Anthropology – David Zahl
3. Night Driving: Notes from a Prodigal Soul – Chad Bird
4. We’re All Heroes in Our Own Story – Jon Quitt
Low Anthropology – David Zahl – Quotes:
* “A church with a low anthropology is a place to bring your failures and your shame. It is a place to lay those things down, to hear about second chances and third chances and fourth chances. It is a place to go and not be turned away no matter how overwhelming your limitations are, by what forms your self-centeredness has expressed itself, or how much damage your doubleness has done. Even more than a place to come together, it is a place to fall apart. And there is always room for a few more faces.”
* “There is an inherent God-given dignity to every creature on the planet. This side of eternity, however, goodness has been distorted, such that it often takes the form of inner conflict and self-centeredness. You might even say that the Imago Dei is less a picture of what we are now than of what we will be then (Col. 1:15).”
* “When I no longer expect myself or others to be consistent or consistently admirable, I might stop resenting them for failing to be so.”
* “As someone persuaded of the veracity of the Christian gospel – and that it is a force for good unlike any other – I am saddened to see Christianity lose its unique insights about who we are (and, by extension, who God is). After all, it was Christ who said, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners’ (Mark 2:17 NRSV). He was not interested in the role models, the moral strivers, or those whose lives were a template for perfection. He beelined toward those whose ledgers were tipped toward failure and who couldn’t seem to find a way out of the messes they’d made (see Rom. 5:6). But my concern moves beyond ecclesial or confessional loyalties. Because no matter our religious background or beliefs, we are all well acquainted with the fallout of tireless perfectionism. It is killing us. The advent of a place we might bring our failures and inadequacies – where those liabilities might be upended and even redeemed – well, that would be welcome news indeed.”
* “The reality is that low anthropology paves a way for real growth and momentum. It does this because it shifts a person’s hopes from their own internal resources (willpower, discipline, natural energy level) to external possibilities. It opens a person to the outside world, to the possibility of love and the surprise of grace. Put another way, if you think your only hope for happiness or betterment lies within you, then you’ll give up when your limitations are revealed – or when your capacities expire with age. If, on the other hand, you accept those fallibilities, well, everything is gravy. The world is your playground, and setbacks are nothing more than par for the course.”
* “Thus, those with a low anthropology can be 99 percent sure that something is right and true, but never 100 percent – which is sometimes the difference between taking up arms and not. That is to say, a low anthropology injects even our most heartfelt conclusions with humility. Per Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s aphorism, the line between good and evil runs through every human heart – not between demographics. Anyone who tells you different is ignoring essential evidence from their own life.”
Night Driving: Notes from a Prodigal Soul – Chad Bird – Quotes:
* This one is by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and was included in Night Driving: “The psalter is the prayer book of Jesus Christ in the truest sense of the word. He prayed the Psalter and now it has become his prayer for all time…we understand how the Psalter can be prayer to God and yet God’s own Word, precisely because here we encounter the praying Christ…because those who pray the psalms are joining in with the prayer of Jesus Christ, their prayer reaches the ears of God. Christ has become their intercessor.”
* “In forgiveness, we lose the control we thought we had because there is no controlling the unrelenting radical grace of a forgiveness crazy Father. This love is frightening to the careful. Reprehensible to the legalist. Dangerous to the moralist. But if you’ve experienced it, you know it’s like being yanked out of the grave and having your coffin lid pried open. It is the most unexpected pleasure in the world to be loved without condition by a God who makes no demands.”
* “You cannot meet God as he truly is until you have met up with yourself as you really are and that means being unmasked.”
* “Freedom comes not from pretending I’m someone I’m not, but from the loving welcome of someone who accepts me as I am.”
* “Author Jessica Thomas describes Christ’s sympathy this way ‘If you put two pianos in the same room and you strike a note, putting hammer to string on one of the pianos, the same string on the other piano will vibrate. That is a picture of Christ’s heart and our own. If one of his family is hurting, his heart hurts in the same way. His heart and our heart become one.’”
* “Repentance is not a work that we perform, but a gift that Christ gives. It’s not an emotion that we stir up within ourselves, but a motion that Christ enacts within us. This motion is always away from us. Away from guilt. Away from self-devised methods of atonement and towards Jesus.”
We’re All Heroes in Our Own Story – Jon Quitt – Quotes:
* “The problem with trying to prove something to Jesus is that it causes us to believe that our striving and our performance are actually worth something. Jesus didn’t need anything from Peter. He wasn’t looking for proof. Peter had already been chosen.”
* “A legacy has less to do with having people remember you and more to do with people remembering Christ and his work.”
* “Sometimes the greatest thing you will do in this life will never be known by another human being. Significance can never be measured by the affirmation of others.”
* “The reason David was a man after God’s own heart was because he experienced the tender discipline of the Lord and drank in His mercy when he deserved judgment. The reason Peter was invited out onto the water was not because of his faith, but because of the power of Jesus to lead. And the reason Moses was able to lead the throng of Israel through the Red sea was not because of his humility, but because of God’s faithfulness to hear the cries of His people.”
* “Moses was the most humble man on the face of the earth because he was the only one who had seen God face-to-face and lived. There must be something about the proximity to the glory of God that puts a man in his place.”
* “Daily repentance will grind away at your flesh’s need to be known and praised.”
Worship – A. W. Tozer – Quotes:
* “The true fear of God is a beautiful thing for it is worship. It is love. It is veneration. It is a high moral happiness because God is. It is a delight so great that if God were not, the worshiper would not want to be either. He or she could easily pray ‘My God continue to be as thou art or let me die. I cannot think of any other God but thee.’ True worship is to be so personally and hopelessly in love with God that the idea of a transfer of affection never even remotely exists. That is the meaning of the fear of God.”
* “The man who walked about in Jerusalem with dust covered feet and disheveled hair walking in the wind from one place to another was the same Lord God who could make the mighty come down with His voice. This is our Christ. This is our Jesus. And I recommend to you, my friend, that you seek to know Him as He is in His majesty in order that you might know how mighty fortunate you are. If He had stood by His majesty and had not been willing to meek Himself down, you’d have been in bad shape.”
* “Without a complete dependance on the Holy Spirit, we can only fail. If we have been misled to believe we can do Christ’s work ourselves, it will never be done. The man whom God will use must be undone. He must be a man who has seen the King in His beauty.”
* “In Chicago, I was introduced to a deeply serious Christian brother who had come from his native India with a stirring and grateful testimony of the grace of God in his life. I asked him about his church background, of course. He was not Pentecostal. He was neither Anglican or Baptist. He was neither Presbyterian or Methodist. He did not even know what we mean by the label ‘interdenominational’. He was simply a brother in Christ. This Indian had been born into the Hindu religion, but he was converted to and became a disciple of Jesus Christ by reading and seriously studying the New Testament record of the death and resurrection of our Lord. He spoke English well enough to express his Christian concerns for the world and for the churches. I asked him to speak in my pulpit. Through that encounter, I realized that unless we arouse ourselves spiritually, unless we are brought back to genuine love and adoration and worship, our candlestick could be removed. We may need missionaries coming to us, indeed. We may need them to show us what genuine and vital Christianity is!”
* “If God can be understood and comprehended by any of our human means, then I cannot worship him. One thing is sure, I will never bend my knees and say ‘holy, holy, holy’ to that which I have been able to decipher and figure out in my own mind. That which I can explain will never bring me to the place of awe. It can never fill me with astonishment, wonder, or admiration.”
* “If you do not know the presence of God in your office, your factory, your home, then God is not in the church when you attend. I have come to believe that when we are worshiping – if the love of God is in us and the Spirit of God is breathing praise within us, all the musical instruments in heaven are suddenly playing in full support. It is my experience that our total lives, our entire attitude as persons, must be toward the worship of God.”
* “If there is to be true and blessed worship, some things in your life must be destroyed, eliminated. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is certainly positive and constructive, but it must be destructive in some areas, dealing with and destroying certain elements that cannot remain in a life pleasing to God.”
Wild & Wrecked 