What is inside me, the thing I love with, and the thing I think about God with, and the thing I love poetry with, the thing I read the Bible with — that thing God keeps on making bigger and bigger. That thing is me, and God will keep on making it bigger to all eternity, though he has not even got me into the right shape yet.
— George MacDonald, Wisdom to Live By, p. 30
If we believe that God does his best for every man and woman, we must also believe that God knows every person’s needs, and will, for love’s sake, not spare one pang that may serve to purify the soul of one of his children.
— George MacDonald, Wisdom to Live By, p. 21
God seems to take pleasure in working by degrees. The progress of the truth is as the permeation of leaven, or the growth of a seed.
— George MacDonald, Wisdom to Live By, p. 19
God is against sin. While those who resist him remain one with their sin, he is against them — against their desires, their aims, their fears, and their hopes. And thus he is altogether and always for them.
— George MacDonald, Wisdom to Live By, p. 17
God wants to build you a house whereof the walls shall be goodness; you want a house whereof the walls shall be comfort. But God knows that such walls cannot be built; that kind of stone crumbles away in the foolish workman’s hands.
— George MacDonald, Wisdom to Live By, p. 16
God gave man power to thwart his will, that, by means of that same power, he might come at last to do his will in a higher kind and way than would otherwise have been possible to him.
— George MacDonald, Wisdom to Live By, p. 12
This is, after all, a love story.
Why else would love be the deepest yearning of our hearts?
Isn’t love the greatest joy of human existence? And the loss of love our greatest sorrow? Do not the two great commands confirm this? “Love the Lord your God with all your heart . . . and your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27). Love, for this is your destiny. Love God, and love each other. The banners that fly over God’s kingdom are the banners of love. It’s not about Bible study and faithful church attendance, not even dutiful marriage. Take the heart out of all that and it will absolutely kill you. This story is meant to be a passionate love affair. “I have loved you,” God says, “with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with loving-kindness” (Jeremiah 31:3).
We live in a love story, a romance written before the foundations of the earth. Aren’t the most impassioned pleas of the Bible directed toward love?
— John and Stasi Eldredge, Love & War, p. 27
Were it possible for God to forgive an unforgiving man, the man himself would not be able to believe for a moment that God did forgive him, and therefore could get no comfort or help or joy of any kind from the forgiveness; so essentially does hatred, or revenge, or contempt, or anything that separates us from man, separate us from God too.
— George MacDonald, Wisdom to Live By, p. 12
It is the kindest thing God can do for his children sometimes, to let them fall in the mire. They would not hold by their Father’s hand; they struggled to pull away; he let them go, and there they lay. But when they stretch forth the hand to him again, he will take them, and clean, not their garments only, but their heart, and soul, and consciousness. Pray to your Father, my child. He will change your humiliation into humility, your shame into purity.
— George MacDonald, Wisdom to Live By, p. 6
God is tender — just like the prodigal’s father — only with this difference, that God has millions of prodigals, and never gets tired of going out to meet them and welcome them back, everyone as if he were the only prodigal son He had ever had. There’s a Father indeed.
— George MacDonald, Wisdom to Live By, p. 4