Quotes by Counselors - Page 11

Jesus was and is the greatest restoration specialist of all time.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
A true work of art is shaped by the hands of another, and if in shaping us that ‘other’ is anything other than God, the piece will never touch the remotest periphery of its potential.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Worlds of my own creation are erected with walls that are within but a few scant paces of each other. The world that God creates for me has no idea what walls are.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I ruthlessly expend my time and my energies seeking many random things, none of which will bless me in the way that I suppose they will, for despite my frequently stubborn resistance to the thought, the single and sole blessing that I can be utterly confident in is found in seeking God alone.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I am wholly deserving of all the consequences that I will in fact never receive simply because God unashamedly stepped in front of me on the cross, unflinchingly spread His arms so as to completely shield me from the retribution that was mine to bear, and repeatedly took the blows. And I stand entirely unwounded, utterly lost in the fact that the while His body was pummeled and bloodied to death by that which was meant for me and me alone, I have not a scratch.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Denial is a seductive ruse of our own making, force-fitting our agendas by forcing out truth all because we bent to fear rather than bowed to God.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I would be dreadfully remiss not to think that God would painstakingly craft something an intimately ingenious and inexplicably intricate as my life, and that by virtue of such sheer brilliance I should not examine it with the greatest precision and unleash it with the fullest abandon.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It would be infinitely more prudent to be a single “David” standing with God, than a million “Goliath’s” standing without Him.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The most elusive and ultimately impossible act of liberation is freedom from sin and self, and no document or declaration of man regardless of how exquisitely penned can do that. Such an astonishing act of liberation could only have been penned in one place: the cross.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
God would have us cherish even the smallest of blessings, for in taking a blessing for granted we are well on our way to taking it to its grave.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To keep my life free of evil I must of necessity keep my life full of God, for keeping my life full of anything else will give evil everything else.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
What insanity propels me to incessantly invest in a world that never ceases to fail me? And what ignorance bewitches me so thoroughly that it keeps me from investing in a God who never ceases to be unfailing?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
At this moment God might not necessarily be a necessity, but know that His absence will of necessity eventually result in His necessity.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
For once in my life maybe I ought to actually think about taking God at His word, and in doing so to suddenly find myself riotously welcoming the rather shocking reality that Christmas is truly everything that He says it is.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We must leave Christmas to be what it is, for to reduce it to the stuff of myth and whimsy is take the single and sole hope of a dying humanity and obliterate it. And I would contend that such an action is insanity of the greatest sort.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The cross unerringly exposes this stunningly marvelous and abruptly exquisite declaration that God will not let this single life of mine, with all of its grotesque maladies and pathetic filth pass into oblivion without unflinchingly declaring that my life carries a value worth the expenditure of His. And if I dare look upon the cross, I am utterly perplexed but wholly enraptured by the immensity of such a love as this.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
What insanity causes a king abandon the comforts of his kingdom and willfully discard the privileges of royalty in order to save an ornery and rebellious people who have spent a lifetime rejecting him? We have yet to understand that such an action is nothing of insanity. Rather, it is everything of love.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
God chose to deliberately venture into and intentionally occupy depths far below and infinitely beyond that which any human has ever descended, and then to raise Himself back up to glory from those horridly dark places. And I pray that we never miss the fact that Christmas is God’s invitation for us to join Him in the rising.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Christmas embodies everything that I need. However, everything that I need is often made up of a lot of stuff I don’t want.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I would like to say that I’m sacrificial. But am I sacrificial enough to acknowledge the fact that I’m not?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
More often than not, rejecting rescue is in reality rejecting our need to be rescued. And it may very well be that is why so many reject Christmas.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Perfect majesty that deliberately chose to be born into abject poverty, walk a road of perpetual poverty, and be unjustly executed in the raw nakedness of poverty is utterly ludicrous unless I realize that this is the single and sole way that God can reach me in the suffocating poverty that I myself have created.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
What we’re searching for will determine where we arrive, or if we arrive. And right in the middle of such risky choices, Christmas is God perfectly solving the problem by showing us what to search for and then bringing it to us.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It’s not so much about writing the story of Christmas itself, as ingenious as it is. In reality, it’s much more about writing the story of Christmas into the story of life so that it will become the story of life.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
This is the wonder of Christmas, that in the solitary form of an impoverished infant God has handed me everything that I could never create so that I can be everything that I could never be.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I worship the fact that I don’t worship anything, amongst other things what I’m worshipping is denial.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
When surrounded by the ashes of all that I once cherished, despite my best efforts I can find no room to be thankful. But standing there amidst endless ash I must remember that although the ashes surround me, God surrounds the ashes. And once that realization settles upon me, I am what I thought I could never be ... I am thankful for ashes.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Today I must look in the mirror and be thankful for the person who I find staring back at me. For although the reflection is terribly imperfect, and I know that full well, God created it with enough room that one day it would be perfect. And if there is nothing else I can find to be thankful for, let me begin here.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The Christmas story is penmanship of the most brilliant sort, where God crafted a beginning that would never be subject to an ending.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The best way to see majesty is to strip away everything that pretends to be majestic so that which is fake wholly collapses in the face of that which is majestic. And God in a manger is likely the most remarkable example we have of such a monumental truth.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I am not the sum total of my accomplishments, for no matter how much I exhaust myself acquiring those accomplishments, the sum total of them will always be far too trifling to ever reflect my true value. My value rests in the fact that I am an accomplishment of God so incalculably valuable that He gave up Himself rather than give me up.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To dream only of what is ‘possible’ is to be fooled into believing that one is dreaming in the first place.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Is safety the ‘dream’ that will kill all of my other ‘dreams?’ For the truth is, no ‘real’ dream is safe.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Deep in his heart, every man longs for a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue.
John Eldredge
I incessantly look for water in wells dug by men, and I have drunk enough sand to prove it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Why is it when I pursue the praises of men I find myself with everything that I’ve looked for but nothing that I need? That’s because I have an extraordinary habit of looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Maybe consequences are dear friends in stealthy disguise.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I would suggest that our imagination is a tiny shard of God’s infinite genius that we have within us simply because we were created in God’s image.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The greatest imagination in all of existence is one that would be able to take ‘nothing’ and imagine ‘something’ from ‘nothing.’ And that is God.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Without an imagination we would be irreparably shackled to what is, and never be released to what could be.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Dream extravagantly, for God has imbued us with ample imagination to dream out to and across the very periphery of the impossible.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I often wonder if my imagination is one of God’s choicest gifts bestowed upon me to deliberately break me free from the frequent doldrums of my humanity.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I wholly unleash my imagination and forcefully stretch it out beyond its own edges, even at such a point I can only imagine a thin shard of this most immense God. And even though it is but a thin shard, it will nonetheless be mesmerizingly colossal.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Christmas is God deciding to become what He never had been, so that we can become what we never could be. And so, God does the most improbable thing imaginable. He orchestrates His own birth.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Our imagination is God’s ingenious gift that hands us the privilege of romping and playing in realities that we can’t see only because we’ve yet to create them.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
At the end, a journey based on my imagination will leave me imagining that I should have engaged the very thing I used my imagination to avoid.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We may find great relief and inexplicable solace in purposefully looking beyond grief in order to determine the provision made within it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
There’s something of a restorative quality about spring, where something whispers wild rumors of new beginnings arising from the seemingly dead seeds in our lives. There’s something almost cruel about it all, as if there might be some sort of truth about a new life actually being possible. Yet, maybe it is true.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
In the oddity or maybe the miracle of life, the roots of something new frequently lie in the decaying husks of something old.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We lose the understanding that death always begets life of some sort, and that life is always an opportunist, persistently standing ready to build something out of the smoldering ashes and raise something up out of the tangled carnage.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We myopically stare at the gaping hole left in our lives and see nothing but the hole, not realizing a hole is defined by everything around it that is not a hole.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Whatever might be taken from me need not leave me with a deficit in its wake.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We can’t even remotely fathom that whatever is ending for us is always more than an ending.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
God has hewn out a hidden path more glorious, tantalizing and adventuresome than the path trod by most, and it is a path seen only through the eyes of our wounds, felt solely through the heart of our losses, and singularly traversed by those with a limp in their step.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Too often my solution is to let something die because I can’t keep it alive, when God’s solution is to let something live because His Son already died for it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Loss eventually arrives when something departs. Grief is working through both.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The greatest loss lies in our inability to accept loss.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
A hole is a space where everything has been moved out so that opportunity has space to move in.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Loss is the uninvited door that extends us an unexpected invitation to unimaginable possibilities.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Maybe the thing that we’re losing is the very thing that has caused us to lose everything else in the first place.
Craig D. Lounsbrough