Quotes from Night Driving

Last week, I finished Night Driving: Notes from a Prodigal Soul by Chad Bird.  It is a book I would recommend as the author communicates well and shares how God met him every step of his journey.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book:

God specializes in broken people...No matter how badly we have wrecked our lives, our Father is in the thick of that disaster to begin the work of making us whole again...Every step of the way we are accompanied by the God who, in Jesus Christ, will never un-love us, un-adopt us, un-redeem us.

Christ's forgiveness precedes our repentance--and calls it forth...Once more, we lose control. And in loss is freedom. At the foot of the cross we are equal--equally guilty, equally forgiven, equally loved.

We realize, in our weakness, that we are totally dependent on the strength that comes from the grace of Christ...freedom comes not from pretending I'm someone I'm not, but from a loving welcome from one who accepts me as I am. The grace of Christ is enough for all of us: it frees us not only to be sinners in ourselves, but to be saints in him. We don't glory in sin; we confess it...With the loss of each disguise, I gained more freedom to rest in the identity I have in Jesus. When we are weak, Christ is strong within us.

How weak or strong our faith is, how pure or impure our confession is, how sincere or insincere our repentance may be--all of this is beside the point. Christ didn't die and rise potentially for us if we believe enough, repent enough, improve enough.  The only "enough" is Christ. His assurance of "I forgive you" is as certain as his declaration from the cross: "It is finished." His words do what they say.

Real change happens when we see the flaws in the church as a reflection of our own flawed hearts--and when we realize that this community of the broken, the undesirable, is precisely the community where Christ is at work to love and to forgive...The pulpit leads us away from our soled past into the arms of Jesus, in whom we are made clean.

This is Christian growth: to become in our weakness more and more dependent on his strength, to seek in our woundedness more and more of his healing.