God First

“When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now. In so far as I learn to love my earthly dearest at the expense of God and instead of God, I shall be moving towards the state in which I shall not love my earthly dearest at all. When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased.” -TIm Lane and Paul Tripp, Relationships

The Fatal Flaw

“The fatal flaw of human wisdom is that it promises that you can change your relationships without needing to change yourself.” -Paul Tripp and Tim Lane

How Life Experiences Affect Relationships

“I often think of a case I had involving a fourteen-year-old who had run away from her foster home with a group of young men from her neighborhood. Instead of being her allies and protectors, they’d taken her to an empty apartment and gang-raped her. I could tell that she had learned at a young age that she couldn’t trust adults; she wore an attitude of skepticism and hostility like a suit of armor….” -Kamala Harris, The Truths We Hold

The Kinds of People In Life (According to Nathan Hill’s The Nix)

“Any problem you face in a video game or in life is one of four things: an enemy, obstacle, puzzle, or trap. That’s it. Everyone you meet in life is one of those four things.”-from Nathan Hill’s The Nix

Flourishing Relationships

“Relationships flourish when we believe the best about others, not assume the worst.” -BJ Thompson

How Great Loves Become Subtle Hatreds

“We may give our human loves the unconditional allegiance which we owe only to God. Then they become gods: then they become demons. Then they will destroy us, and also destroy themselves. For natural loves that are allowed to become gods do not remain loves. They are still called so, but can become in fact complicated forms of hatred.” -C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“God is Love,” Not “Love is God”

“St John’s saying that God is love has long been balanced in my mind against the remark of a modern author (M. Denis de Rougemont) that ‘love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god’; which of course can be re-stated in the form ‘begins to be a demon the moment he begins to be a god’. This balance seems to me an indispensable safeguard. If we ignore it the truth that God is love may slyly come to mean for us the converse, that love is God.” -C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Yes, You Do Need Other People

“Where Need-love is felt there may be reasons for denying or totally mortifying it; but not to feel it is in general the mark of the cold egoist. Since we do in reality need one another (‘it is not good for man to be alone’), then the failure of this need to appear as Need-love in consciousness—in other words, the illusory feeling that it is good for us to be alone—is a bad spiritual symptom; just as lack of appetite is a bad medical symptom because men do really need food.” -C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

 

“He lacks nothing, but our Need-love, as Plato saw, is ‘the son of Poverty’. It is the accurate reflection in consciousness of our actual nature. We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.” -C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

The Game Plan for Forgiving Others

“Tim Keller once defined forgiveness as resolving not to bring the offence up again with God, with the person who offended us, or with ourselves. Often it is the final one of these that is the most difficult.” Sam Allberry, Why Bother With Church?