154 Quotes by Erwin Raphael McManus

If the safest place to be is in the center of the will of God, then an appropriate measure of God’s will is the test, ‘is it safe?’... This view runs counter to what we find in the Scriptures. I want to reiterate the fact that the center of God’s will is not a safe place, but the most dangerous place in the world.

What if the creative act is not an act against God but a reflection of His image within us?

The warrior knows that their imagination is not a place to escape but to create.

The life of faith is less about gathering information than it is about expanding imagination. The movement Jesus started was a movement of dreamers and visionaries, not a movement of academics and theologians.

If we are inherently spiritual creatures, we are by our nature creative beings, yet we live in the fear that if we aspire to be more we will discover ourselves to be less.

Most people who describe themselves as visionaries are actually saying something quite different. They are abdicating their responsibility for the details. Details matter. The more someone or something matters to us, the more the details relating to them matter to us.

What is your idea of you? Who is it that you have decided to become? If your greatest work of art is the life you live, and ultimately life is a creative act, what life will you choose to leave behind as your masterpiece?

When we are freed from the rules and regulations that are so often imposed on us in the name of God, we discover that creativity is the natural result of spirituality. And if this is true, then our soul is the primary material for all artistic expression.

Who we were created to become already exists in the mind of God. It’s placed in our physical DNA and in the longings of our soul. Our lives are supposed to be a manifestation of the imagination of God, and whatever else we leave behind – the life we choose to live and the person we choose to become – is the ultimate expression of the artisan soul.