19 Quotes by Lydia Brownback

Self-seeking breeds loneliness; self-forgetfulness breeds fullness.

What we focus on defines us, so if our focus is inward, on ourselves, we wind up defining for ourselves whether we are righteous or guilty. When we begin and end with us – with our self – we miss the heart of the gospel and never truly find the freedom for which we ache.

Any teaching that sets self-love as the highest good is false teaching, and we are susceptible to it because it appeals to that deep yearning for affirmation we feel at our very core. That’s why it hooks us.

God doesn’t want our efforts at self-improvement. He wants our trust in his kindness toward us in Christ.

What begins as self-care can morph into habits of laziness, where we are unwilling to exert ourselves without some pleasurable comfort as an accompaniment.

As a result, we don’t see anything wrong with aiming more at personal gratification than at God’s glory in the plans and choices we make, in some part because we believe that our earthly happiness is the primary way God’s glory is revealed.

If we center our thoughts and activities on ourselves, our world grows increasingly narrow, and over time our view of reality is warped. Without realizing it, we become the measure of all things in our own minds.

The only way to joy is to interpret our circumstances by God’s Word rather than to judge God by our circumstances.

Real trust isn’t believing that God will do things as we expect he should; it is, rather, believing that whatever he does is good and perfect. We will only find relief from fear if we relinquish our expectations of what we think God ought to do for us and ask him to create within our hearts a trusting expectation for what he wills to do. If.