anything - week 1

this summer, i'm joining an awesome group of ladies online through good morning girls to study God's Word and read the book anything by jennie allen.

we've just finished our first week and i thought i'd use my blog to post some of my favorite parts of the book and our weekly verse from our study.

chapter 1 - plastic god

abandoning unbelief

p. 5 every sin at its root, is based in something we do not fully believe about God.

p. 7 unbelief is no small thing. it lays the foundation for all the places we struggle, and ultimately faith in Christ is what will separate those who belong to God from those who do not.

p. 9....many people who study the Bible never find God. many people who go to church never really know him. the only exercise that works 100 percent of the time to draw one close to the real God is risk....."to risk is to willingly place your life in the hand of an unseen God and an unknown future, then to watch him come through. he starts to get real when you live like that."

p. 10 stepping out wholly dependent on God to come through, stepping away from what is secure and comfortable exposes the holes in our faith.

chapter 2 - least good

abandoning pretending

p. 14 on a core level, are we really as "good" as we think we are?

p. 15 though some of my behavior came from a pretty sincere place, the truth has always been that without God's intervention, I am selfish and prideful every minute of every day.....there is something to humility that is costly...something resembling humiliation...an outright declaration of the wreck we are without God rather than composing a beautiful existence that barely needs a savior.

p. 17 it physically hurts to see our pride, to see our sin, to quit playing good, to feel broken and to need God. and it hurts even more to let others see it. so we run from falling; we choose large fig leaves to cover up with and not God. we run from that vulnerable feeling that we may not measure up, all while aching to measure up.

p. 18 there is something so beautiful about people aware of their sin and their need for God. that is beautiful to God. he can work with that, enter into that. jesus' first command after nearly every encounter with a needy person was for them to repent. he promised these broken people hope and healing. he promised to make a way for them.....they thought they were fine without jesus. they did not need him.

p. 19 pretending to be good halts God's movement in our life.

p. 21 we don't want to fall. we like to see great testimonies of God's grace, but we don't want to be the testimony.  (hands down my favorite quote from this week)

chapter 3 missing buttons

abandoning shame

p. 27 when we are saved, spiritual things begin working inside us and disrupting that way we used to think and live. sin becomes distasteful because it fights with who we are. God becomes our chief desire. these are marks that we are believers. unless there is some craving for God and some distaste for sin in us, we should question if we are believers. we are children of a living God who wants us out of bondage, out of sin, out of the weight of shame.

p. 28 true grace threatens our control. but it gives us something too!

p. 31 but when God calls us to something that feels backward, it is usually his path to our freedom. the path out of shame is to see our sin and turn from it toward our God. and there we find peace and a God who can say, "I can take care of this...Actually it's already been taken care of."