QUOTES for shaping your own story

In my last post, I told you about Dan Allender's book, To Be Told -- know your story, shape your future.  Here are some great quotes from the book that I think you may find helpful:

The unique glory you offer:

What about God am I most uniquely suited to reveal to others?

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Living by the wrong scripts:

They have lived less in the light of the story of God and more by the inevitabilities of life's demands.  In other words, they allow circumstances to write their story.
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We have permission to shape our story:

We are called to co-author the ending [rest of our story] according to the themes that the primary Author has penned for us.  We are called to take up our pen and follow him.  It is the enormous humility of the sovereign Author to give us a voice in the dialogue.  And not only does he want us to write, but he cheers us on.
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Discovering your calling:

But how in the world do we know our calling?  I've seen that our calling always seems associated with the name that God gives each one of us.
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Vicarious living:

Too many people are missing their story because they're watching the stories of others.
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Your unique role:

God has ... given us a role that will reveal something about him that no one else's story can reveal in quite the same way.

Five quotes on the Kingdom of God

THE KINGDOM:  What you can't see is often more important than what you can.  Because of Jesus, the eternal has penetrated the temporal, and heaven and earth have collided.  The Kingdom of Heaven is near and the veil is thin.

“It is the childlike mind that finds the kingdom.”  - Charles Fillmore

“If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God first, it will in the end make no difference what you have chosen instead.”  - William Law

“For me Christianity is about the Kingdom, not about the Church:  it has to do with human growth and development not church growth and development.”  - Michael Taylor

“The doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, which was the main teaching of Jesus, is certainly one of the most revolutionary doctrines that ever stirred and changed human thought.”  -  H.G. Wells

"Earth is crammed with heaven,and every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries."
- E. Barrett Browning

Seven quotes on 'CALLING'

Heart and callling are inextricably linked:  you can't know your calling without knowing the deep desires of your heart -- and believing that they are trustworthy.  Within your new heart lie desires God is awakening. Here are some quotes on 'calling:'

• “For the most part, I do the thing which my own nature prompts me to do.  It is embarrassing to earn so much respect and love for it.”  -- Albert Einstein
  


• “Progress is not created by contented people.”  -- Frank Tyger
  


• “Man’s ideal state is realized when he has fulfilled the purpose for which he is born.  And what is it that reason demands of him?  Something very easy – that he live in accordance with his own nature.”  (Seneca)


• “The place God calls you to is the place where your deepest gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”   -- Frederick Buechner
  
  
• "[Our] original shimmering self gets buried so deep we hardly live out of it at all . . . rather, we learn to live out of all the other selves which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather."   --Frederick Buechner
  
  
• "What I do is me: For that, I came."  -- Poet Gerard Manley Hopkins

• "What is in you that is so unique, that if you don't live with it, the Kingdom of God will live without it?"  -- Gary Barkalow, www.thenobleheart.com

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Listen to the podcast:  "A life of desire"

Listen to the podcast:  "Recovering our desire"

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How about you?  Do you have any quotes on calling/purpose you can share?

Changing our nature...what has already occurred within

Why does God insist on making us loveable, lovely, whole?  For certainly he has always loved us, even when we were unlovable; yet this wasn't enough for him, says C.S. Lewis:

"...it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less."  - C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

"We may wish, indeed, that we were of so little account to God that He left us alone to follow our natural impulses - that he would give over trying to train us into something so unlike our natural selves:  but once again, we are asking not for more Love, but for less."  -- C.S.  Lewis, The Problem of Pain

I want to answer Lewis here (not knowing how he might respond)...   In order to fashion us into the supernaturally glorious creatures he desires and loves into wholeness, God indeed did change our natural selves, our natural impulses -- from unlovely to noble and good.  This he did at the level of the heart. 

We need not wait for heaven for this.  It has already happened.  It is the promise of Ezekiel 36:26 fulfilled (and in other places throughout Scripture).  We now grow out of that new and noble nature with its noble impulses.  We practice our new nature.  Discipleship is learning how to live from that good heart.

Quotes

"If you, like most people I know, are worn out from a lifestyle of accumulation, then an invitation to a lifestyle of conversation and community is welcome."
- Randy Frazee
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“God is changing the church, and that, in turn, will change the world. Millions of Christians around the world are aware of an imminent reformation of global proportions. They are saying in effect: ‘Church as we know it is preventing church as God wants it.’ Amazingly, many are hearing God say the same thing to them.”
--Wolfgang Simson (Houses That Change the World).
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"The spiritual life cannot be made suburban. It is always frontier; and we who live in it must accept and even rejoice that it remains untamed."
- Howard Macey
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 "Freedom is useless if we don't exercise it as characters making choices..."
- Daniel Taylor
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 "The truth lies in a man's dreams... perhaps in this unhappy world of ours whose madness is better than a foolish sanity." - Cervantes
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“Man finds it hard to get what he wants, because he does not want the best; God finds it hard to give, because he would give the best, and man will not take it.” - George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons