Authentic Humility

"[A]uthentic humility is simply an attempt to see ourselves as we really are. Applied to our thinking, this means an uncompromisingly honest appraisal of the capacities and limitations of our minds against the standard of an all-knowing, infinitely intelligent and always true God. This reality check can be simultaneously heartening and sobering.

According to the Bible, we are created in God's image. This means that we are born as rational and creative beings with capacity to find and apply truth. This should be a source of immense encouragement to us. However, Scripture and reality both teach that our minds are also finite and tainted by the effects of sin, giving us good reason to approach both out own reasoning and the knowledge of others with a healthy degree of skepticism."

Philip E. Dow, Virtuous Minds: Intellectual Character Development

Shadow Comforts

"Are my choices comforting and nourishing my spirit, or are they temporary retrieves from vulnerability and difficult emotions ultimately diminishing my spirit? Are my choices leading to my Wholeheartedness,  or do they leave me feeling empty and searching?"

Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

"Smallness of Soul"

"[R]eading Thomas Aquinas (1224-74) on the virtue of courage, I happened across a vice which he called pusillanimity, which means 'smallness of soul.' Those afflicted by this vice, wrote Aquinas, shrink back from all that God has called them to be. When faced with the effort and difficulty of stretching themselves to the great things of which they are capable, the cringe and say, 'I can't.' In short the pusillanimous reply on their own puny powers and focus on their own potential for failure, rather than counting on God's grace to equip them for great work in his kingdom--work beyond anything they might have dreamed of for themselves." 

Rebecca Kronyndyk DeYoung, Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins

Another example of the need for Christians to dare greatly through the power of the grace of Christ.

Jesus is my Redeemer

"But is Jesus my therapist or my Redeemer? If he is my therapist, then he meets my needs as I define them. If he is my Redeemer, he defines my true needs and addresses them in ways far more glorious than I could have anticipated.
If Jesus is my therapist, he is the One who comes to affirm me. Instead of trying to love ourselves, we think about how much Jesus loves us. This approach is deceptive because it latches onto a very powerful aspect of the gospel: God does shower his love upon us in Christ! Everyone who reads the Bible knows this. But this approach subtly turns Jesus into the One who meets my needs and fills my emptiness--as I define them. It turns God's love into something that only serves me. Repentance for our rebellion and sin against God is minimized or even ignored while God's love for us is maximized. We turn Jesus into someone whose goal in life is to make us feel good about ourselves."

How People Change Timothy S. Lane and Paul David Tripp

What's really down there?

The problem of isms

"When the gospel is reduced to a catalog of isms where I choose the one most attractive and comfortable for me, I can participate extensively in Christianity without much personal sacrifice, and with my self, unchallenged, at the center of it all."

Examples: Formalism, Legalism, Mysticism, Activism, Biblicism, "Pyschologyism," "Socialism"

"These isms also appeal to our environmentalism. We tend to believe that the sin that surrounds us is more dangerous than the sin that resides inside us. This is why it is hard for a husband to understand that he can't blame his coldness on his wife, more can the wife blame her bitterness on her husband, more can their child blame his rebellion on his parents' failures."

How People Change Timothy S. Lane and Paul David Tripp

The Gospel Gap

"The gospel gap in many of our lives doesn't stay empty either. If we do not live with a gospel-shaped Christ-confident, and change-committed Christianity, that hole will get filled with other things. These things may seem plausible and even biblical, but they will be missing the identity-provision-process core that is meant to fill every believer."

How People Change Timothy S. Lane and Paul David Tripp

I call this the God-shaped hole--to me this is more accurate. We need God--Christ is the gospel!